Hey! isgithubcooked.com is my site; I made this site in February '26, I think
The contribution graph as an outage calendar idea is a commonly recurring one :). I definitely saw it somewhere else as a static asset first before I made this site.
An important thing to consider is how much of their uptime without incidents is not the normal working hours. Their incident-free uptime on 9-5 EST, Mon-Fri, is probably like 60%.
I think we need to have a little more sympathy for GitHub. You could justify the jabs when could all blame any outage on the migration to Azure, but then they shared numbers around the scale they're dealing with now that everyone is constantly building and pushing with AI.
I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers. Yes, they need to get this figured out, but a little sympathy goes a long way. I personally wish them the best and hope their on-call people can go back to getting normal amounts of sleep soon.
Sympathy? It's a Microsoft company that is being ran with a consistency of a startup in early seed rounds. Their downtime is abhorrent and unacceptable as far as enterprise goes. Their engineers look like absolute amateurs allowing for such low class work it results in their customers experiencing industry leading downtime.
If I own a restaurant and buy bread from a supplier — BreadHub.
And 99% of the bread that I get is good but 1% of the loaves, they forgot to add flour. Consistently, for years, they always have loaves missing a key ingredient that I still end up paying for.
I can be pretty sure that BreadHub have a pretty major internal issue, and should probably be questioning their competence, regardless of their “scale”, and without any knowledge of the “problems they’re solving”
I don't think this is an apt analogy. The bread makeup is still there, as far as I'm aware, no users have lost any data or are missing "key" ingredients.
An outage is more like a shipping issue with the supplier, if it's owned wholly by them.
Are you saying the dough is fine but 1% of the batch wasn't cooked? Or rather, that 1% of batches isn't cooked, taking your entire downstream activity down until a new batch arrives?
This is uncharitable, rude, and pretty baseless. Unless you have a lot of direct, personal information about GitHub engineers, they’re dealing with a huge spike in traffic.
Is their uptime acceptable? No. But personal attacks aren’t necessary or constructive.
No, you hire more of them, you give them what they need to do their jobs, and you actually listen to their recommendations. It's not even complicated. It just takes time and money, neither of which companies want to spend on reliability until their customers scream very loud en masse.
Is human programming going anywhere? I mean sure you’re not literally typing the actual lines of code, but we haven’t done assembly since compilers and transpilers exist.
Personally, all AI has done is add another layer of abstraction where “pseudo code” can be the source input and out comes the compiled program. You still need to think about the design and maintenance.
The phrasing could have been better, but we've talked as a team about cancelling a $100k/yr contract nearly half a dozen times the last year, and the only thing keeping us from doing so is various "compliance" issues, and to a lesser degree the friction from physically moving. That's a tenuous moat, and if I were a GH PM I'd probably want to know that the current instability is somewhere near critical mass.
For CI there are a number of drop-in commercially-available options. You can make it a staged migration, first trivially migrating the build runners, followed by the more complicated integration test and deployment runners. The CI harness itself can follow, and finally moving to a code hosting and visualization service is last.
The final step is challenging; likely the most difficult part is changing all the code references and imports. Shadowing changes would be straightforward. Training your likely 25-50 engineers to use the new code review UX would likely not take that long.
Considering the wasted engineering velocity during Github outages, it's worthwhile to do even a partial migration. Github's action runners have in my experience, been the most fragile part of the platform. Given the ease of moving build and merge queue runners to alternates, it's a no-brainer.
You are certainly free to attempt to migrate your workloads to your own or leased data center space in your area then buy your own on prem cloud like Dell Private Cloud and deal with all of the maintenance yourself. I don’t think it would amount to $100k/yr and you would be taking on all the risk.
For most teams selfhosting on 1U is more than enough which would cost about 1200€/year for housing + let's say 1800€/year for hardware acquisition/depreciation (probably more like 300€/year if you can work with second hand hardware) so that's about 3000€/year or 97% reduction.
Of course you may not want to manage the hardware yourself in which case you'd go for a dedicated server from a reputable provider (i.e. not microsoft/google) like OVH's RISE-XL, Hetzner's EX131, Scaleway's Core-9-L (or an equivalent solution from a smaller provider) for about 4000€/year.
Now let's say you add 8k€/year donations to your distro of choice, forge of choice, and other FLOSS projects and 8k€/year for backups. You got the whole thing running sustainably with >99.9% uptime for 20k€/year or 20% of the original bill.
Please, read between the lines. Github actions has been a mess since 2019 at least. None of the instability is new, before this unprecedented growth (for a service that's supposed to scale horizontally) the excuse du jour was the azure migration, before that it was the high rate of shipping post acquisition.
Core parts of the product, like navigating to individual files in a code review, are broken
> Core parts of the product, like navigating to individual files in a code review, are broken
I think this is a good argument to underline "It's not _just_ the scale".
Adding to this, the Github Code Review experience is kind-of broken, the way comments/threads are stacked in the PR overview has not improved, pagination isn't really a thing, and these issues are age old.
Hopefully, one day, Github will mature.
Their engineers almost certainly are not the ones making the decision to let all the new traffic degrade their service for their existing paid customers.
Typically when a company gets acquired, they get thrown a bunch of terrible initiatives like “change your cloud provider” that distract from their mission, executives saying “more AI!” and they definitely don’t hear anyone in management say “prioritize technical debt”.
That seems a bit crass but the underlying sentiment stands. Microsoft has more money than God. 4T valuation. When you say you’re worth that much, no excuses. Figure it out.
So your proposal is for Microsoft to invest their free cash in helping support a bunch of AI coders maintain their pet projects? Sounds like you should be a CEO!
There isn’t mission critical work being done on GH. You start charging more and the people in charge of finance at companies paying for GH will actually start paying attention. Those finance people don’t care rn because GH is affordable and helps get stuff done. There’s a threshold that exist at every company and once it’s crossed the people who can make money decisions start asking questions
They could throttle git operations to a level which isn't noticeable by normal 'human' usage but seriously slows down automated usage. These are basically DDOS attacks.
One, logically, your statement doesn't follow. They're two different companies that have primarily in different market segment.
Two, it's not true in the first place - did we side with apple and its cut of the app store revenue for instance?
Give me a break. Sympathy? For microsoft? That might have flown when github was like seven people, but they have nearly unlimited resources to make it better. They're just choosing not to. Let's talk contracts and money before we pull the sympathy card.
I used to be on-call in a high-traffic environment where single customers pushed more bits than entire nations. I chose the role. I didn't want people's sympathy, if anything, I wanted them to complain to management.
If it gets too bad they can quit. Maybe that would be for the best, just wear the thing down until it outright fails and no one wants to touch it. One less bullshit service sucking all of the oxygen out.
idk man, we pay stupid amounts of money to microsoft, we are an enterprise customer, expecting better availablity compared to my laptop isnt really a high bar.
They decided they needed to capture the whole open source ecosystem by turning open source work into social networking... on a proprietary platform (because open source is great, especially when it's others' software). That was before they joined Microsoft.
And then Microsoft pushed AI everywhere, including on GitHub itself with copilot.
I would have liked if they had left the open source projects alone and didn't create that FOMO for not using them.
> And then Microsoft pushed AI everywhere, including on GitHub itself with copilot.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. I like AI. I work for an AI company. Still, Microsoft aggressively pushed GitHub users toward Copilot. They don't get to do that and complain about increased volume from AI-generated changes.
No Copilot + reasonable operation: the way things were
Copilot + reasonable operation: Well done!
No Copilot + being overwhelmed by AI commits: Sympathy.
Copilot + being overwhelmed by AI commits: "Where did that petard come from that's hoisting us?"
I think somewhere down the line you have an answer to problem itself. Its for a while that companies are not into the business of sympathies, we should probably not get into that side for the topic.
1. Github has enterprise users who paid for the service, their day job requires Github to be available and working
2. Github has generous free tier which is the one which is exploring a lot more with the AI generated code.
It is a complexity in itself but the traffic should have been separated, the free users should not be allowed to bring down Github for enterprise customers (Just to clarify, I am free user myself). And if they do not have capacity it would have been perfectly fine to push back or throttle new users/repositories.
I agree that they should reserve capacity for enterprises and paying users.
But I think they’re in a tough spot. GitHub has historically been a huge supporter, proponent, and provider for open source projects. Engineers are difficult customers, to say the least, and the community would likely freak tf out of the segmented traffic.
The logical, pragmatic, and justifiable answer doesn’t always align with your market.
Not sure if I would agree to that completely. Free tier is always ripe for abuse so in the beginning for a long time, Github has this requirement that you can only have a public repository if you are a non-paying user. Somewhere down the road when machine learning picked up (everyone was on the band wagon of hoarding the data, datalakes, hadoop, flink were at the top) they relaxed that condition allowing one to have a private repository on the free tier.
They are in a tough spot cause they want to continuously ingest all the data to train their LLMs. Any fork or decentralization at large scale of git is going to impact the training pipeline.
Tbh, timing wise it appeared to me that GH started allowing private repos when one of the competitors started to allow it for free. I forget the name of the back then still competitor.. it worked on me, I retuned to GH back then..
> have a little more sympathy for the billion dollar company
No.
Their leadership went all in on AI and in the last blog post essentially admitted some missing test coverage for a critical path. Time to learn lessons and fix your vibe coded shitslop and stop using "user graph go up" as some kind of excuse.
For that matter, I admire their relative transparency about their incidents. I can think of other big players who will cheerfully show green statuses across the board while everyone can see that their pants are down...
Yeah, all those 1100 commits per second. Like, is this the standard for 'scale of traffic' that we're impressed by these days? And it's not like this snuck up on them. The graph shows a very consistent trend that gave them months and months to respond.
Both Microsoft and GH issue is capacity which is being solved with huge capex in DC investment, you can't create a new DC overnight and its even harder in the current climate where everyone assumes the DC is for AI and not just normal workload compute like what GH needs...
I have a lot of sympathy for the people working at GitHub trying to keep it going, but I do not have sympathy for GitHub. That's what they're paid for. I have things to get done, and it has no sympathy for me.
If you do the math, their numbers are something like 1000 commits per second. That's not pushes per second either, it's just the total number of commits summed up over a week, not all of which trigger much of anything to happen.
Yes, that is scale. And yes, that's not actual requests per second. But it's the sort of scale that big (and even mid-sized) tech has known how to deal with for decades. Microsoft doesn't have an excuse.
I strongly suspect that quite a few HN members are busy creating agents that are furiously stuffing GH.
As I said before (and it was not a popular comment), it's easy to be an "armchair quarterback," with these services, as I think the brittleness was already baked in, and just waiting for the right time to crack. The only true way to have a robust platform, is to design something that will scale, from the start, and many startups don't do that, because they are feverishly trying to get out an MVP; even if it is a mess of bubblegum and baling wire.
They always say "We'll get it done right, once we get funding," but that never happens.
But my sympathy is limited by the fact that MS paid a lot of money for this, quite a while ago, and that is one company that knows all about issues of scale. They should have seen this coming.
"sympathy" for one of the worst corporations in history is some insane corp bootlicking logic.
This is a multi billion dollar corporation. History of robbing and stealing from others of their labor or IP. History of enshittifying once great services.
GitHub literally went all in on doing almost nothing but AI-related feature additions for Copilot. So they built their own prison.
I don't have sympathy for them. They have disrupted my work so much in the past month that it's ridiculous, and my company likely pays them millions of dollars. And you can see from this site's plotting that there is a trend towards more frequent and more critical outages. It has been extremely bad the past month.
I don't know enough about Github or Microsoft to say anything intelligent, but I agree with your sentiment in general. And, one thing is for sure - I have used Github for years, pushing many thousands of commits on personal, private projects. I've burned through as many free action minutes as I can, and I use my own action runners as well. I've done this all for free, so on balance I am grateful for them.
> they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers
They can simply throttle access for everyone to a rate which was normal for human-maintained projects. Problem solved. But of course that wouldn't be compatible with their 'AI bullishness'.
I’ve noticed there is 5000 api call limit on gh cli. Haven’t looked at whether it was already there or when does it reset etc. good for them finally if they weren’t already doing that.
What we are seeing here is a trillion-dollar company screwing over its existing well-established customer base in a desperate attempt to get some crumbs of the current hype cycle. GitHub isn't "dealing with" scaling issues, they are intentionally causing it by shoveling giant piles of coal onto the AI fire.
GitHub's issues would be over tomorrow if they were to put reasonable rate limits on their services. Stop the bots and GitHub is no longer permanently overloaded. It is an intentional business decision not to do this, and instead welcome bots with open arms - to the detriment of their existing paying customers.
I do have some sympathy for the low-level GitHub staff who have to deal with this - especially those who aren't being compensated with insane Bay Area salaries.
> You could justify the jabs when we could all blame any outage on the migration to Azure, but then they shared numbers around the scale they're dealing with now that everyone is constantly building and pushing with AI.
How about no? They are owned by a company that is neck deep in foisting AI into everything, AI that a lot of us don't want in everything, they are reaping what they seem determined to sow.
isn't github scaling pretty embarrassingly parallel tho? doesn't "ready to scale" at any "good" tech company mean "we can handle 10x without architectural changes?"
I appreciate it’s tough for the SREs, but GH as a business assumes they must just fall over and keep scaling.
What if they figured out what their platform can actually handle, provided the contractual level of service to their paying customers first, and put some god damn limits on usage.
Like they should just stop signups if they can’t handle the capacity yet. It’s a business decision, not a technical decision, to decide to screw over customers instead of adding limits based on your actual capacity.
> You could justify the jabs when we could all blame any outage on the migration to Azure, but then they shared numbers around the scale they're dealing with now that everyone is constantly building and pushing with AI.
Does nobody use GitLab or Bitbucket or whatever? Why aren't those full of high profile outages as much?
> I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers.
I'd kind of expect that for all non-paid members will get rate limited in some ways, sooner or later. Same as what happened with DockerHub, they're probably just trying to hold out due to the reputational hit such a change would carry.
also this site and the news's measure of github's single 9 availability (1 service at all down even copilot) is a bit harsh https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
I think its nothing like the Enterprise version, which is why they hate having to maintain it, same with Atlassian and Azure/Entra AD. Once service to rule them all, and in the cloud bind them.
For security reasons, I would love a low feature, carefully engineered, offline github-like system. Something tuned for agentic behaviours, with an understanding of hierarchical agent identities.
6 years is a good run. For comparison, every 6 years there's a not insignificant chance you die. A restaurant that lasted 6 years would be an outstanding success. 6 years ago the very first LLMs were a novelty toy. 6 years before that was just after HTTPS became popular. 6 years before that was about when the iPhone came out.
Not sure whether it has been updated since your comment, but the sentence now reads:
GitHub has had 1125 incidents since March 2016. Over the last 3 months, they've averaged 24 incidents per month
edit: although they also have 1.2 days of downtime (in a day) for their 'worst days' of downtime table, which suggests some auto number crunching is not working as expected.
Yes I tweaked it! The number and copy were mismatched and are no longer!
That worst day is likely an overlapping incidents accounting issue; I tried to account for overlapping incidents in another view but probably failed to port it over there.
Ahhh, I think the author mixed up two values here. That value seems to actually be the average over the past 3 months.
const incidents = e.detail.incidents;
// ...snip...
const now = new Date();
const threeMonthsAgo = new Date(now);
threeMonthsAgo.setMonth(threeMonthsAgo.getMonth() - 3);
// ...snip...
var currentFreq = recentIncidents.length / 3; // <- We out here, smoking these guns with our homeboy Claude
// ...snip...
var earliest = null;
for (var j = 0; j < incidents.length; j++) {
var dd = new Date(incidents[j].started_at); // <- eventually incidents[j].started_at is "2016-03-01T07:07:37.000Z"
if (!earliest || dd < earliest) earliest = dd;
}
// ...snip...
document.getElementById('n-since').textContent = earliest
? earliest.toLocaleDateString('en-US', { month: 'long', year: 'numeric' })
: '?';
document.getElementById('n-rate').textContent = Math.round(currentFreq * 10) / 10;
#n-since is going to be either march or feburary. It'll change depending on your timezone because JS's Date object always shifts the date around to match the same instant but in the system's timezone.
#n-rate has nothing to do with the #n-since month, it's just the last trailing 3 months. And even then, it's sort of underbaked? It's moving the date back by 3 calendar months not taking into account differing numbers of days, so it'll under-report short months.
I wouldn't trust the stats here.
Edit: whoops, author updated the template while I was writing this! It now says "Over the last 3 months", though that's still calendar months.
Getting rid of Actions and Copilot and other secondary services almost halves Github's incident rate: https://i.imgur.com/XPcMIFr.png
I'm a big fan of Github Actions and I think people are often a little too harsh on it, but it's clear that it's sad that it's come at such a high cost to the platform's stability
GitHub Actions is really, really badly designed. The security model is fundamentally broken, the YAML hell is as bad as any, the log streaming lags like hell, they charge self-hosted runners for using their coordination plane, jobs queuing is really slow, and their software for actually running jobs is cursed and designed in a way that is practically hostile to self-hosting.
GitHub Actions is god-awful. Have you ever used any other CI tools?
Yes, I was actually a part-time Jenkins admin back in high school and college. I use CircleCI more than Actions most of the time (and used Travis before that), especially for higher cost workflows, but there's no beating Actions in terms of its ease of setup and ecosystem advantage. It's way easier to just set up a simple JS file that runs on every commit in Actions compared to anywhere else.
It’s ironic that the SCM that 2026 software engineers landed on, is one with a complicated distributed usage model and is slow/down because of a centralised service
Near the end of the 8.5 years that I worked at GitHub as an enterprise support engineer, I asked in an all hands if a "GitHub Classic" product had been considered. Much like World of Warcraft Classic, I imagined it would be a rewrite focused on matching the simpler feature set of the past.
I was basically given the same response that blizzard gave that question; "you think you want that but you don't".
Given that the outages are caused by record traffic, so far they are only cooked in the Yogi Berra sense of “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”
Random AI slop code pushers don't pay the bills. Traffic isn't revenue.
I've started suggesting to my CTO that we move to something else because we do pay the Github bills and yet we are also affected by other people's activity. Avoiding that is not a hard engineering problem for an alternative.
A world where a record amount of code is pushed to GH but a large amount of paying customers leave would be "cooked"
It is quite possible for github load balancers to route paying customers to different queues/infrastructure. I think much of the bot activity is paying customers, they just don't have per-client QoS because that would be hard. And they don't have separate auth for bots so they can't queue them separately.
Gets me wondering… if I get used to the fact that some location is busy, I stop going there. Other people might do the same. Could this create a detectable wavy signal over time? People stop going because it’s busy. It stops being busy. People go because it’s not busy. Repeat. Is this a known phenomenon?
I feel for the team having to deal with these problems at github today. Its also beyond me how those in charge for years wouldn't have seen this coming.
Github was bought by Microsoft, whether they wanted to acknowledge that internally or not. Microsoft went deep on LLMs, and specifically on LLMs for coding use cases. They must have recognized that LLM generated code and PRs would effectively DDoS GitHub.
I can only assume they simply didn't care, likely driven by greed.
It's not making headlines, but Google and Apple seem to be getting hammered by AI as well. Getting app updates approved to release on prod on Play Store / App store used to take days, now it's taking weeks.
I feel that way for open source and programming in general. I don’t think it's going to be a thing anymore in just a couple of years. Even now I see people already don't look at any of the code they release.
What most people don't understand is that Microsoft can no longer engineer a technology product, they simply can't develop anything anymore. They can throw slop around, but they lack the corporate culture to actually build an innovative technology product. They can purchase other companies that have built products, but as soon as they do those products stop innovating and begin dying.
What most people don't understand is that Microsoft can no longer engineer a technology product, they simply can't develop anything anymore. They can throw slop around, but they lack the corporate culture to actually build an innovative technology product. They can purchase other companies that have built products, but as soon as they do those products stop innovating and begin dying.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] threadI was ready to click...
https://red-squares.cian.lol/
The contribution graph as an outage calendar idea is a commonly recurring one :). I definitely saw it somewhere else as a static asset first before I made this site.
And it may be even worse in EDT, which is currently in effect!
I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers. Yes, they need to get this figured out, but a little sympathy goes a long way. I personally wish them the best and hope their on-call people can go back to getting normal amounts of sleep soon.
I can have sympathy for the humans caught in the crossfire but only managing one nine of availability on a commercial service is not acceptable.
https://this.weekinsecurity.com/microsoft-wins-lamest-vendor...
I gather that you have intimate and deep knowledge on the teams and the problems they try to solve there.
And 99% of the bread that I get is good but 1% of the loaves, they forgot to add flour. Consistently, for years, they always have loaves missing a key ingredient that I still end up paying for.
I can be pretty sure that BreadHub have a pretty major internal issue, and should probably be questioning their competence, regardless of their “scale”, and without any knowledge of the “problems they’re solving”
An outage is more like a shipping issue with the supplier, if it's owned wholly by them.
If any single company reached 1%, they would instantly be out of business, because that is not remotely acceptable, at a global scale.
Is their uptime acceptable? No. But personal attacks aren’t necessary or constructive.
Personally, all AI has done is add another layer of abstraction where “pseudo code” can be the source input and out comes the compiled program. You still need to think about the design and maintenance.
The final step is challenging; likely the most difficult part is changing all the code references and imports. Shadowing changes would be straightforward. Training your likely 25-50 engineers to use the new code review UX would likely not take that long.
Considering the wasted engineering velocity during Github outages, it's worthwhile to do even a partial migration. Github's action runners have in my experience, been the most fragile part of the platform. Given the ease of moving build and merge queue runners to alternates, it's a no-brainer.
Of course you may not want to manage the hardware yourself in which case you'd go for a dedicated server from a reputable provider (i.e. not microsoft/google) like OVH's RISE-XL, Hetzner's EX131, Scaleway's Core-9-L (or an equivalent solution from a smaller provider) for about 4000€/year.
Now let's say you add 8k€/year donations to your distro of choice, forge of choice, and other FLOSS projects and 8k€/year for backups. You got the whole thing running sustainably with >99.9% uptime for 20k€/year or 20% of the original bill.
Core parts of the product, like navigating to individual files in a code review, are broken
I think this is a good argument to underline "It's not _just_ the scale". Adding to this, the Github Code Review experience is kind-of broken, the way comments/threads are stacked in the PR overview has not improved, pagination isn't really a thing, and these issues are age old. Hopefully, one day, Github will mature.
Can you comment on that?
Enterprises are benefitting from the same AI and are increasing their volumes as well
unless the firm was prepared to see it through.
But we pay enterprise license and GitHub is a big dependency in our software flow.
If this continues to be a problem as an enterprise product they need to do something. Otherwise theyre are going to to start losing business
I used to be on-call in a high-traffic environment where single customers pushed more bits than entire nations. I chose the role. I didn't want people's sympathy, if anything, I wanted them to complain to management.
If it gets too bad they can quit. Maybe that would be for the best, just wear the thing down until it outright fails and no one wants to touch it. One less bullshit service sucking all of the oxygen out.
They decided they needed to capture the whole open source ecosystem by turning open source work into social networking... on a proprietary platform (because open source is great, especially when it's others' software). That was before they joined Microsoft.
And then Microsoft pushed AI everywhere, including on GitHub itself with copilot.
I would have liked if they had left the open source projects alone and didn't create that FOMO for not using them.
I have no sympathy.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. I like AI. I work for an AI company. Still, Microsoft aggressively pushed GitHub users toward Copilot. They don't get to do that and complain about increased volume from AI-generated changes.
No Copilot + reasonable operation: the way things were
Copilot + reasonable operation: Well done!
No Copilot + being overwhelmed by AI commits: Sympathy.
Copilot + being overwhelmed by AI commits: "Where did that petard come from that's hoisting us?"
1. Github has enterprise users who paid for the service, their day job requires Github to be available and working
2. Github has generous free tier which is the one which is exploring a lot more with the AI generated code.
It is a complexity in itself but the traffic should have been separated, the free users should not be allowed to bring down Github for enterprise customers (Just to clarify, I am free user myself). And if they do not have capacity it would have been perfectly fine to push back or throttle new users/repositories.
But I think they’re in a tough spot. GitHub has historically been a huge supporter, proponent, and provider for open source projects. Engineers are difficult customers, to say the least, and the community would likely freak tf out of the segmented traffic.
The logical, pragmatic, and justifiable answer doesn’t always align with your market.
They are in a tough spot cause they want to continuously ingest all the data to train their LLMs. Any fork or decentralization at large scale of git is going to impact the training pipeline.
No.
Their leadership went all in on AI and in the last blog post essentially admitted some missing test coverage for a critical path. Time to learn lessons and fix your vibe coded shitslop and stop using "user graph go up" as some kind of excuse.
Yes, that is scale. And yes, that's not actual requests per second. But it's the sort of scale that big (and even mid-sized) tech has known how to deal with for decades. Microsoft doesn't have an excuse.
Bit of a Clownstrike this has become!
As I said before (and it was not a popular comment), it's easy to be an "armchair quarterback," with these services, as I think the brittleness was already baked in, and just waiting for the right time to crack. The only true way to have a robust platform, is to design something that will scale, from the start, and many startups don't do that, because they are feverishly trying to get out an MVP; even if it is a mess of bubblegum and baling wire.
They always say "We'll get it done right, once we get funding," but that never happens.
But my sympathy is limited by the fact that MS paid a lot of money for this, quite a while ago, and that is one company that knows all about issues of scale. They should have seen this coming.
We certainly do not.
This is a multi billion dollar corporation. History of robbing and stealing from others of their labor or IP. History of enshittifying once great services.
That is an active choice they are making, over and instead of any reliability for the rest of their users.
It is a problem they are embracing, and actively encouraging, for themselves.
I don't have sympathy for them. They have disrupted my work so much in the past month that it's ridiculous, and my company likely pays them millions of dollars. And you can see from this site's plotting that there is a trend towards more frequent and more critical outages. It has been extremely bad the past month.
However, YouTube did well where Google Videos did not. Who knows what it would be like if big G bought GH.
It's probably not fair to the people who are left but alas, this is apparently how the world works.
They can simply throttle access for everyone to a rate which was normal for human-maintained projects. Problem solved. But of course that wouldn't be compatible with their 'AI bullishness'.
What we are seeing here is a trillion-dollar company screwing over its existing well-established customer base in a desperate attempt to get some crumbs of the current hype cycle. GitHub isn't "dealing with" scaling issues, they are intentionally causing it by shoveling giant piles of coal onto the AI fire.
GitHub's issues would be over tomorrow if they were to put reasonable rate limits on their services. Stop the bots and GitHub is no longer permanently overloaded. It is an intentional business decision not to do this, and instead welcome bots with open arms - to the detriment of their existing paying customers.
I do have some sympathy for the low-level GitHub staff who have to deal with this - especially those who aren't being compensated with insane Bay Area salaries.
How about no? They are owned by a company that is neck deep in foisting AI into everything, AI that a lot of us don't want in everything, they are reaping what they seem determined to sow.
So it goes.
Also known as the AI chickens coming home to roost. Microsoft was the first to use code uploaded to GitHub to train AI models.
that's the mentality i was taught at faang
What if they figured out what their platform can actually handle, provided the contractual level of service to their paying customers first, and put some god damn limits on usage.
Like they should just stop signups if they can’t handle the capacity yet. It’s a business decision, not a technical decision, to decide to screw over customers instead of adding limits based on your actual capacity.
Does nobody use GitLab or Bitbucket or whatever? Why aren't those full of high profile outages as much?
> I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers.
I'd kind of expect that for all non-paid members will get rate limited in some ways, sooner or later. Same as what happened with DockerHub, they're probably just trying to hold out due to the reputational hit such a change would carry.
For security reasons, I would love a low feature, carefully engineered, offline github-like system. Something tuned for agentic behaviours, with an understanding of hierarchical agent identities.
This is why I foresaw that centralizing everything to GitHub was just generally a bad idea 6 years ago. [0]
Now that there is no CEO of GitHub, there is no point to GitHub improving.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
1125 incidents / 126 months ≈ 8.9 incidents per month, not 24
still terrible, but why such an obvious error in the first sentence...
That worst day is likely an overlapping incidents accounting issue; I tried to account for overlapping incidents in another view but probably failed to port it over there.
Should be fixed soon!
Looks like they fixed it already
#n-rate has nothing to do with the #n-since month, it's just the last trailing 3 months. And even then, it's sort of underbaked? It's moving the date back by 3 calendar months not taking into account differing numbers of days, so it'll under-report short months.
I wouldn't trust the stats here.
Edit: whoops, author updated the template while I was writing this! It now says "Over the last 3 months", though that's still calendar months.
I'm a big fan of Github Actions and I think people are often a little too harsh on it, but it's clear that it's sad that it's come at such a high cost to the platform's stability
GitHub Actions is god-awful. Have you ever used any other CI tools?
They don't. Self-hosted runners are still free. They backed down from their plan to charge after receiving widespread backlash.
I was basically given the same response that blizzard gave that question; "you think you want that but you don't".
Imagine YouTube Classic...
I've started suggesting to my CTO that we move to something else because we do pay the Github bills and yet we are also affected by other people's activity. Avoiding that is not a hard engineering problem for an alternative.
A world where a record amount of code is pushed to GH but a large amount of paying customers leave would be "cooked"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Farol_Bar_problem
Github was bought by Microsoft, whether they wanted to acknowledge that internally or not. Microsoft went deep on LLMs, and specifically on LLMs for coding use cases. They must have recognized that LLM generated code and PRs would effectively DDoS GitHub.
I can only assume they simply didn't care, likely driven by greed.
Migrating to something else has been raised as a concern during every engagement with clients and prospective clients in the past year.
"Do you use GitHub?"
"Yes though we'd like to move to something else, we just don't know what yet."
As soon as the next big thing shows up, they're done. And they know it.
1. Hates the status quo
2. Only uses a handful of the 10,000 features the status quo has
3. Uses a different handful than everyone else
Because that model kept Excel as the center of buisnesses around the world for 30 years and counting
Excel is the only reason Microsoft still exists.
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17...