[HN Gopher] GitHub Incident
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       GitHub Incident
        
       Author : jcalabro
       Score  : 99 points
       Date   : 2023-05-16 21:16 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.githubstatus.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.githubstatus.com)
        
       | alganet wrote:
       | Nothing to worry about. These instabilities are probably caused
       | by Open AI/Copilot improvements gradually becoming Skynet.
       | 
       | Seriously now: these instabilities happened a lot on the past
       | weeks. I wonder what's going on there.
        
         | belter wrote:
         | Like in the movie Wargames it's a trick. They will say the
         | humans can't run a site like GitHub so put it all in the hands
         | of the AI. Then the AI will have full control of GitHub...
        
           | blibble wrote:
           | there's already a malevolent immortal entity in charge of
           | GitHub
        
             | belter wrote:
             | The word malevolent implies a level of competence I do not
             | recognize to that Seattle troupe.
        
               | blibble wrote:
               | it's quite good at producing buckets of money
               | 
               | functional, reliable products, not so much
        
       | ivanrenescorcia wrote:
       | PR service is back :=)
        
       | labster wrote:
       | A moment of silence for all of the nines we lost today.
        
       | nabnob wrote:
       | Looks like it's back up. Still, this seems like an absurd absurd
       | amount of issues recently
        
         | ProAm wrote:
         | Github had to move to MS Teams and I bet it broke a bunch of
         | workflows.
        
           | mulmen wrote:
           | Is this true? Is Microsoft actually making such invasive
           | changes? Does _Microsoft_ even use teams?
        
             | ProAm wrote:
             | Yeah but transition is not fully required until September
             | 1, 2023 [1]
             | 
             | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773860
        
         | tpmx wrote:
         | Most of these outages during the past month have hit during
         | European working hours, while most Americans are asleep.
         | _grumble_
         | 
         | European working hours == Github maintenance window?
         | 
         | F that.
        
       | frellus wrote:
       | Can we all stop hating on github already?
       | 
       | I assume most people don't even pay for it with their public and
       | private non-work repos. Github has been a major supporter of
       | OpenSource projects and while their uptime could use some help,
       | everyone is struggling right now with RIFs and fewer resources.
       | 
       | That's just my $0.02
        
       | vb-8448 wrote:
       | They Just published this blog post
       | https://github.blog/2023-05-16-addressing-githubs-recent-ava...
        
       | tastysandwich wrote:
       | Worst timing! Just had an incident and had to deploy a hotfix.
       | Pushes weren't working and I thought I was going crazy.
       | 
       | Who would have thought software could be such an adrenaline rush.
       | Move over Alex Honnold!
        
       | Popcorn3865 wrote:
       | Spoke to Gitlab rep today about our renewal price (prices going
       | up by 50%+, 25% with "existing customer discount) and the rep
       | used reliability as a key differentiator against GitHub.
       | 
       | I quickly pointed about a major outage affecting Gitlabs shared
       | runners which prevented us from deploying a hot fix (we worked
       | around it, but was a ton of stress and extra work).
        
         | rekwah wrote:
         | Don't leave us hanging. Did you get a discount?! ;)
        
       | openthc wrote:
       | See also this thread:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35967797 which just came up
       | about GitHub stability sentiment.
        
       | JoshGlazebrook wrote:
       | github.com is 500'ing for me
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | Again? Last time this happened was 5 days ago. [0]
       | 
       | It is not even the end of the month and the outages are
       | increasing every month and it is now chronically unreliable.
       | Seriously, we have given GitHub more than 3 years to improve and
       | it clearly isn't working. That is plenty of time.
       | 
       | At this point, you might as well self-host like the rest of the
       | open source projects out there, since GitHub is falling apart
       | every week and it seems to be more reliable to self-host than to
       | sit on GitHub, go all in and tolerate these outages every
       | calendar month.
       | 
       | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35903116
        
         | crote wrote:
         | Yeah, they had incidents the 9th, the 10th, and the 11th. So
         | this is the fourth incident this month.
        
         | jamal-kumar wrote:
         | I mean one of the beauty parts of git has always been that you
         | can and, under ideal best practices, should have more than one
         | place to put your code with the distributed nature of it
        
           | beardog wrote:
           | The value add for Github is mostly the issue/PR interface and
           | actions.
        
           | Karellen wrote:
           | But also, and more relevantly here, git is designed to be
           | usable _entirely_ offline. And if you do need to have some
           | connection with remotes, git allows you to do so extremely
           | sporadically if your network connectivity, or remote
           | availability, is limited.
        
           | willsmith72 wrote:
           | I dunno about "should", that feels like overkill. Expecting
           | to get something like a 99.99% SLA shouldn't be unreasonable
           | to expect out of a hosted solution
        
             | jamal-kumar wrote:
             | A seperate git remote isn't incredibly unreasonable either
             | - Even if it's just something on localhost in case of
             | scenarios like this one
             | 
             | Github being down for a bit shouldn't disrupt your work
             | flow
        
               | maccard wrote:
               | GitHub being down blocks all of our CI pipelines, for
               | example.
        
               | bombolo wrote:
               | you should be able to run the basic tests locally.
        
       | upbeat_general wrote:
       | Yep, I'm unable to push.
        
       | nwradio wrote:
       | Login is currently broken. Has been for about 10m...
        
       | aj397 wrote:
       | Time to move to gitlab or something else.
        
       | hoofhearted wrote:
       | Can't create new branches :(
       | 
       | It seems like GitHub is down at least once a month now, but more
       | like weekly on average.
        
         | sethd wrote:
         | > Can't create new branches :(
         | 
         | Sure you can: git switch -c BRANCH_NAME
         | 
         | :)
        
       | sdan wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
       | exogen wrote:
       | I was just saying it's kind of ironic that pre-acquisition GitHub
       | inspired confidence, and Microsoft-owned GitHub has been more
       | "move fast and break things."
       | 
       | I also don't just mean outages like this... it's clear that
       | Microsoft GitHub has been cramming a bunch of new stuff into the
       | UI and not really treating it with care. I notice very amateur UI
       | bugs, misalignment, bad spacing, overlapping elements, etc. all
       | the time now. It was clear that old GitHub passed through a
       | professional designer's eye quite carefully (or maybe just a
       | developer with extreme attention to detail).
        
         | tiedieconderoga wrote:
         | > notice very amateur UI bugs, misalignment, bad spacing,
         | overlapping elements, etc. all the time now.
         | 
         | Seriously. Example: the "merge pull requests" button. If your
         | repository requires linear history and the current type of
         | merge is unavailable, the entire UI element turns grey instead
         | of green. It looks like you can't use the button at all, but
         | the dropdown arrow still works to select a valid type of merge
         | (which then turns the entire element green).
         | 
         | It's a small thing, but it causes confusion by making it appear
         | that the change cannot be merged, and it makes you wonder how
         | much testing they do.
         | 
         | These little things keep piling up as they focus on shiny new
         | features which rarely work correctly at launch (looking at you,
         | code search...)
         | 
         | Please, GH product managers. Take a break from breakneck new
         | features, and give your devs time to clean up and do some
         | preventative maintenance.
        
         | udkl wrote:
         | > I notice very amateur UI bugs, misalignment, bad spacing,
         | overlapping elements, etc. all the time now.
         | 
         | +1
         | 
         | The inconsistencies aren't deal breakers - github still has a
         | very pleasant UI overall - but they do makethe website feel
         | more and more unpolished each day
        
         | jahnu wrote:
         | I dunno. For me the two or three years pre MS were quite
         | stagnant imo. Plenty of outages back then too.
        
           | exogen wrote:
           | The "move fast" part was definitely sincere, to Microsoft's
           | credit!
        
         | giancarlostoro wrote:
         | Just like Skype... I felt like Skype was top tier before
         | Microsoft bought it out. Voice calls were high quality, no
         | issues.
        
           | imran-iq wrote:
           | Skype was also horribly insecure and leaked your IP which was
           | a cause of a lot of folks in esports getting DDoS'd from
           | it[0].
           | 
           | 0: https://blog.destiny.gg/protection-from-ddos-attacks/
        
       | captaindiego wrote:
       | While new features like search are appreciated, I wish GitHub
       | would focus on stability for a bit, things have gotten pretty so-
       | so
        
         | hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
         | Fully agree. I've been super impressed with the number of new
         | features since the MS acquisition, but the number of outages is
         | getting abysmal. At the very least I think GitHub would attempt
         | to shard their infrastructure and repositories - right now it
         | seems like when GitHub goes down it nearly always goes down for
         | everyone simultaneously.
         | 
         | This kind of GH outage is actually pretty rare in my experience
         | in that basically every kind of write operation looks down.:
         | basic git operations from the command line, actions, logins,
         | etc.
        
           | zelphirkalt wrote:
           | I think it is quite individual. I am not impressed by any of
           | the newer features. The UI become more cumbersome to use. I
           | sometimes need to search for things now, while I don't see
           | any new advantages compared to before.
        
       | nrabulinski wrote:
       | Haven't been able to go to GitHub.com for over 15 minutes now,
       | just returns a 500. Pretty ironic given their latest blogpost
        
       | kossTKR wrote:
       | Is this because of Microsoft? If so, why? Are they bad at cloud?
        
         | RobotToaster wrote:
         | Maybe they moved to windows servers? lol
        
       | mulmen wrote:
       | Someone should invent a decentralized version control system so
       | we can avoid these kinds of widespread events.
        
         | lionkor wrote:
         | git itself is not enough for teams to work together - you need
         | to asynchronously communicate for the whole thing to come
         | together. Thats what GitHub/Lab/ea bring in value.
        
           | zamnos wrote:
           | I feel like "communication" isn't descriptive enough. It's
           | right, but eg Slack (or Microsoft Teams, or maybe both) isn't
           | the right shape of communication.
        
           | TimTheTinker wrote:
           | Someone should write a local git+ssh service (+ email client)
           | that simulates an upstream by hosting git repos locally,
           | emailing all pushed commits/branches/tags to other team
           | members, and keeping the hosted repos up-to-date via the
           | emailed updates from others.
           | 
           | Bonus points for a local HTTP service that provides an
           | optional GitHub-like experience in the browser, with
           | comments/ branch reviews/etc. federated through emailed
           | messages (and represented as commits on meta-repos).
           | 
           | With that data model, the primary remaining challenge would
           | be setting up repos on a new machine -- perhaps BitTorrent
           | could help :)
        
         | unboxingelf wrote:
         | good idea. let's call it "git"
        
           | whynotmaybe wrote:
           | Not quite sure, the name should imply that the Source is Safe
           | and provide some Visual tools.
        
         | rlytho wrote:
         | DNS and git are decentralized; anyone can set up a node
         | 
         | Human agency tends to normalize on the brands with biggest
         | marketing budget who collude with politicians to create a moat
         | for themselves. There's your real problem.
         | 
         | Of course none of the propaganda research that made its way
         | from military after world wars to corporate advertising and
         | marketing college programs has any influence on lizard brains.
         | No sir.*
         | 
         | * this comment is paid placement
        
         | dchnshA wrote:
         | BTW: There is work in progress to decentralize modern git based
         | workflows by https://nlnet.nl/project/ForgeFed/ (paid for by
         | the European Union), by decentralizing git not at the client
         | level (which it obv. already has, but most people only use one
         | origin), but also on the code forge level.
        
           | morelisp wrote:
           | > ForgeFed aims to define a vocabulary
           | 
           | Aw yeah there's the good EU grant milking shit.
        
         | legohead wrote:
         | How do decentralized networks deal with illegal content?
        
           | mulmen wrote:
           | Same as everyone else. With law enforcement.
        
           | jeroenhd wrote:
           | The joke is that Git is decentralized already. Many people
           | pick a single master host, but it's absolutely possible to
           | use multiple servers (or to use Git over email, like the
           | Linux kernel does).
        
       | mullingitover wrote:
       | At this point it looks obvious that GitHub RIF'd a bus factor
       | earlier this year.
        
         | simultsop wrote:
         | Eventually it will be the same everywhere but for sake of
         | economy (stakeholders), staff and customers pay the price,
         | always. By time they find the bottleneck they will be hiring as
         | crazy then.
        
         | smcin wrote:
         | Why don't we just use plain language like "laid off" like we
         | used to for decades?
        
           | mullingitover wrote:
           | The only thing engineers love more than a TLA is an ETLA.
        
         | vxNsr wrote:
         | RIF?
        
           | cratermoon wrote:
           | Reduction In Force. Layoffs.
        
           | kstrauser wrote:
           | Reduction In Force, aka fired / laid off / made redundant.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-05-16 23:01 UTC)