[HN Gopher] GitHub was having issues
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       GitHub was having issues
        
       Author : rock_artist
       Score  : 332 points
       Date   : 2025-08-12 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.githubstatus.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.githubstatus.com)
        
       | meepmorp wrote:
       | Actually, the big problem for me is that github doesn't have
       | issues at the moment.
        
         | TonyTrapp wrote:
         | Yep, issues are having issues, resulting in user not seeing
         | issues
        
         | boesboes wrote:
         | Yeah, i was pretty glad to see i have zero open issue remaining
         | today!
        
         | jsk2600 wrote:
         | At least I can enjoy seeing zero issues on my projects, once in
         | a lifetime...
        
       | legobmw99 wrote:
       | Day one of the new management structure off to a rocky start
        
         | xyst wrote:
         | always been "rocky" since the acquisition.
         | 
         | This is just perfect comedic timing
        
       | acedTrex wrote:
       | Day ends in Y
        
       | Thev00d00 wrote:
       | Vibe coded a bit too hard.
        
       | belter wrote:
       | Did they upgrade to GitHub 11 ?
        
         | CoastalCoder wrote:
         | Thanks to internal politics, that only possible if they have a
         | Technical Product Manager II (TPM).
        
       | yabones wrote:
       | The only thing worse than "it's down" is hearing "it's down
       | _again_ "
       | 
       | Godspeed, IR workers...
        
         | jeltz wrote:
         | Last time it was down was Friday last week when they broke some
         | of the raw content URLs.
        
       | rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
       | Just Github? I'm having problems logging in into Dropbox as their
       | captcha setup fails.
        
       | halfmatthalfcat wrote:
       | Github reliability has been abysmal the past couple of weeks.
        
       | thrdbndndn wrote:
       | Coincidentally reddit is also down.
        
         | mock-possum wrote:
         | Well at least there's a silver lining then
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | When a cool job becomes boring IT work.
        
       | zanfr wrote:
       | well I wish nothing but the best for the great people at
       | Microsoft, this small family business.
        
       | bootsmann wrote:
       | I am surprised at how much github is willing to let themselves go
       | for being a product that can nowadays be replaced by someone over
       | the weekend. This is the second major outage within like 2 weeks.
        
         | taude wrote:
         | Depends how much customization you've done to your cicd and how
         | heavily you use custom GHA, and other plugins. No way my org
         | could move off in a weekend.
        
           | tracker1 wrote:
           | Agreed... you could probably move a single project over
           | pretty easily on a weekend, or several depending on how
           | integrated you are.
        
         | reaperducer wrote:
         | _for being a product that can nowadays be replaced by someone
         | over the weekend._
         | 
         | If one person can move a company move off of GitHub in a
         | weekend, you're too small a company for Microsoft to care
         | about.
        
           | bootsmann wrote:
           | It was less about moving your company away and more about the
           | core functionality being extremely simple to reproduce.
        
       | nimbius wrote:
       | recent developments in the C levels not withstanding, github has
       | been a dumpster fire for quite some time now with no sign of
       | improvement.
       | 
       | https://www.githubstatus.com/history
        
         | jeltz wrote:
         | Those are not even all. They had an incident with raw content
         | on the 8th which is not listed.
        
       | metalliqaz wrote:
       | Dear sages of HN, what is the scrappy new upstart project that
       | will rise up to take Github's place? Because this is becoming
       | intolerable.
        
         | meepmorp wrote:
         | It's kind of weird that we've collectively decided on a
         | distributed version control system, while centralizing where we
         | keep the repositories and metadata.
        
           | ryandv wrote:
           | This is because the dream of true P2P decentralization died
           | with NAT and IPv4 exhaustion.
        
           | metalliqaz wrote:
           | I think it's just a simple reality that most projects don't
           | actually need or want a decentralized development process. In
           | my experience, most projects are looking for a single, high-
           | reliability canonical source that is in control of project
           | leadership. Most projects are only developed by a small
           | group, maybe even only one person.
        
             | meepmorp wrote:
             | Yeah, I think what people really liked about git (vs many
             | other VCSs at the time) was cheap and easy local branching,
             | not the distributed nature.
        
               | tracker1 wrote:
               | I think the distributed support is pretty nice for easy-
               | ish mirroring. Even to a relatively bare git+ssh target
               | on a self-hosted server. No specialized services
               | required. I mean, just for VCS.
        
               | keybored wrote:
               | Local and distributed is the same difference to me
               | compared to subversion.
        
             | keybored wrote:
             | ^ Comment on the Nth 100+ GitHub Down thread (every thread
             | is like that).
             | 
             | Maybe everyone here is just using it as an excuse to
             | chatter about forges or GitHub being down too much etc. and
             | it has no impact. But if it does and people are honestly
             | fretting they can mirror their repos. Then no one needs to
             | worry _that_ much (except for their cursed CI setups) the
             | next time it happens.
             | 
             | And that's a benefit of peer-to-peer repos right there.
        
         | john01dav wrote:
         | I think that the answer here is eventual widespread use of many
         | smaller options, from FSF's Savannah to self-hosted
         | gitea/forejo/gitlab.
         | 
         | Git is in a good position to support this.
        
           | cAtte_ wrote:
           | not gonna happen. society loves monopolies because they're
           | convenient
        
             | john01dav wrote:
             | We're starting to see the pain of such monopolies. Note
             | that I included a hosted option (Savannah) in my list. It
             | doesn't take everyone leaving github to break the monopoly,
             | just enough to make it not a monopoly.
        
       | evilmonkey19 wrote:
       | I'm a fan of github but lately i'm seeing a lot of issues like
       | these... Also they don't have yet support for IPv6 (surprising).
        
         | awestroke wrote:
         | The refusal to support IPv6 is embarrassing at this point
        
           | geoffeg wrote:
           | I thought a recent downtime was contributed to rolling out
           | the initial prep for IPv6 support.
        
           | kevingadd wrote:
           | Had to buy an IPv4 address for a VPS the other day in order
           | to clone some git repositories. Couldn't believe it. Costing
           | their customers money when they should be able to support v6
           | by now.
        
             | hk1337 wrote:
             | What VPS are you using that doesn't come with both IPv4 and
             | IPv6?
        
               | jraph wrote:
               | There are options where you pay 1EUR/IPv4/month and IPv6s
               | are free.
        
               | miyuru wrote:
               | There are plenty of low end providers that support IPv6
               | only.
               | 
               | At that scale price of IPv4 is the highest cost of the
               | VPS.
               | 
               | Here is a list of providers I created back in 2022.
               | 
               | https://blog.miyuru.lk/ipv6-hosting-2022/
        
               | e3bc54b2 wrote:
               | Hetzner charges extra for IPv4 address, as I believe most
               | of them do. I know because I went through the same crap.
        
               | dehrmann wrote:
               | It seems more like a weird Hetzner thing that they won't
               | give you a IPv4 NAT gateway.
        
               | drozycki wrote:
               | How would a server-side NAT know which Hetzner customer
               | it should route a request to? It has an encrypted packet
               | arriving at this shared address on port 443. You can
               | route a shared address to the proper service based on the
               | HTTP Host header but that can only be done by the
               | customer using their encryption key, so no sharing an
               | address between customers. Home LAN NAT only works
               | because the router can change the source port used by the
               | request so that responses are unambiguously routed to the
               | right client.
        
               | lelandbatey wrote:
               | I don't think they're saying they should support incoming
               | connections on such a NAT, I think they're saying that
               | servers behind the NAT would be able to make outgoing
               | connections (e.g. to access shared resources).
        
               | kingstnap wrote:
               | Well, the answer is easy. It doesn't do any forwarding,
               | so a random 443 packet gets dropped.
               | 
               | It would be the same as with home NAT. Your device can
               | create TCP connections outbound but can't listen/accept.
               | 
               | It would solve the problem of not being able to
               | communicate to another IPv4 server but it prevents you
               | from hosting your own.
        
               | jorams wrote:
               | They charge EUR0.50 per month to add an IPv4 address. A
               | shared IPv4 NAT gateway introduces a whole lot of
               | problems for them just to support customers who need IPv4
               | but don't want to pay a tiny amount for it.
        
               | ta1243 wrote:
               | AWS charges for ipv4 doesn't it?
        
               | hk1337 wrote:
               | In regards to an EC2, AFAIK, not necessarily. You pay
               | extra for an elastic IP (IPv4) which is the equivalent to
               | a static IP but the EC2 is assigned an IPv4 address and
               | an IPv6 when IPv6 is enabled.
        
               | oasisbob wrote:
               | Beginning in early 2024, AWS began charging for every
               | IPv4 address in-use on your resources.
               | 
               | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-
               | ipv4-address...
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | Azure has "support" for IPv6 that just "works", so... they
           | could just turn it on.
           | 
           | Oh, you're wondering about the air quotes?
           | 
           | Don't worry about it! Sales told my boss that that feature
           | checkbox has a "tick".
        
         | depr wrote:
         | Given that they are probably at least partly on Azure, this
         | makes it less surprising because Azure has the worst IPv6
         | implementation of the 3 large cloud providers.
        
           | 77pt77 wrote:
           | Possibly stupid question but, how can someone mess that up?
           | 
           | What is wrong/missing?
        
             | jiggawatts wrote:
             | I've gone on long rants about it before right here on HN
             | but I can't be bothered digging up the old post...
             | 
             | ... the quick and dirty bullet points are:
             | 
             | - Enabling IPv6 in one virtual network could _break_
             | managed PaaS services in _other_ peered networks.
             | 
             | - Up until very recently none of the PaaS services could be
             | configured with IPv6 firewall rules.
             | 
             | - Most core managed network components were IPv4 only.
             | Firewalls, gateways, VPNs, etc... support is still spotty.
             | 
             | - They NAT IPv6 which is just gibbering eldrich madness.
             | 
             | - IPv6 addresses are handed out in tiny pools of 16
             | addresses at a time. No, not a /16 or anything like that.
             | 
             | Etc...
             | 
             | The IPv6 networking in Azure feels like it was implemented
             | by offshore contractors that did as they were told and
             | never stopped to think if any of it made sense.
             | 
             | References:
             | 
             | - Inbound IPv6 support for App Service was added _this
             | week_. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/updates/?id=499998
             | 
             | - Outbound IPv6 support is "Preview":
             | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-
             | service/overview...
             | 
             | - Public IP Prefixes support a maximum of 16 consecutive
             | addresses even for IPv6: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
             | us/azure/virtual-network/ip-s...
             | 
             | - There's an entire page of IPv6 limitations. To understand
             | how nuts this is, just swap IPv6<->IPv4 and see if it still
             | reads like a professional service you'd pay money for!
             | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-
             | network/ip-s...
             | 
             | - You STILL can't use PostgreSQL with IPv6: _" Even if the
             | subnet for the Postgres Flexible Server doesn't have any
             | IPv6 addresses assigned, it cannot be deployed if there are
             | IPv6 addresses in the VNet."_ -- that's just bonkers.
             | 
             | - Just... oh my god:
             | 
             |  _" Azure Virtual WAN currently supports IPv4 traffic
             | only."
             | 
             | "Azure Route Server currently supports IPv4 traffic only."
             | 
             | "Azure Firewall doesn't currently support IPv6"
             | 
             | "You can't add IPv6 ranges to a virtual network that has
             | existing resource in use."_
        
               | 77pt77 wrote:
               | > They NAT IPv6 which is just gibbering eldrich madness.
               | 
               | Yeah! I'm out.
               | 
               | What a complete lack of competence!
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | No CEO of GitHub to contact about this outage this time.
        
         | numbsafari wrote:
         | Contact Satya Nadella.
        
           | siva7 wrote:
           | The guy who framed Github as a stellar example of how
           | Microsoft will let operate its aquisitions independently?
        
             | numbsafari wrote:
             | He is (and was) literally the CEO.
             | 
             | Yeah, he can give whatever title he wants to his
             | subordinates, but the "CEO" of GitHub has been a mid-level
             | VP for quite some time.
        
       | dustypotato wrote:
       | Why does it show me a cookie banner from Atlassian?
        
         | alexjplant wrote:
         | ...because they use Statuspage, an Atlassian product?
        
       | j45 wrote:
       | The cloud is someone else's computer.
       | 
       | I wonder if self hosting is more reliable. How much does a
       | private and firewalled git* instance need updates?
        
         | taude wrote:
         | Before gitlabs, github, etc. it was common to host your own
         | code repos on-prem. The thing now, though, is that there's a
         | lot of add-on functionality for how teams flow from using
         | github over just hosting a git server.... so it's not really
         | apples v oranges, anymore.
        
           | john01dav wrote:
           | You can use a self hosted forge, like gitea, forejo, or
           | gitlab.
        
           | marcosdumay wrote:
           | > The thing now, though, is that there's a lot of add-on
           | functionality
           | 
           | I don't get why people use those.
           | 
           | I understand free software projects that don't want to run
           | any infrastructure, but why companies push their building and
           | deployment out of premises when all you need is one trusted
           | computer somewhere. Why do people insist on trusting cloud
           | computers more than the ones they can kick?
        
           | j45 wrote:
           | Gitlab can handle a lot of CI/CD hosted locally for free that
           | github actually charges for.
           | 
           | Git was originally local only too. People would run their own
           | source code repos, it was trivial to run and maintain for the
           | most part for most basic to intermediate use cases.
           | 
           | I had clients who insisted source code (mine or theirs)
           | couldn't be on a public cloud provider. It's not that
           | unreasonable or uncommon.
        
         | john01dav wrote:
         | I have gitea running in my basement. You can see how often it
         | updates on the gitea github (since they don't self host since
         | they haven't written an importer yet). You could automate this,
         | but I haven't spent enough time updating to make that make
         | sense.
        
         | numbsafari wrote:
         | If you just need a hosted git server, maintenance is mostly
         | just making sure you have a proper storage/backup strategy in
         | place.
         | 
         | If you want to self-host a code forge... start here:
         | https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/upgrade
        
         | homebrewer wrote:
         | Our gitea uptimes are measured in months. The only downtime is
         | during non-working hours for upgrading gitea & the underlying
         | OS, which take about 5 seconds of work and another 15 seconds
         | of waiting for it to upgrade the database and restart.
        
           | j45 wrote:
           | That's great to hear, taking this downtime to install them
           | all and try them out.
           | 
           | At the very least a few backups and mirrors running once I
           | get them syncing.
        
         | tracker1 wrote:
         | If you don't need any features beyond a backup location for
         | git, all you need is an SSH server with FS support. All you
         | need is git on the remote server to initialize a server
         | directory, and you can target that with git+ssh directly. Works
         | well enough as a backup/mirror repository.
         | 
         | If you want to self-host for more features (CI/CD, PRs, etc.)
         | there's GitLab, Gitea, and forgejo that I'm aware of. I think
         | GitLab is a bit heavy duty for most self-hosting usage myself
         | though. I actually appreciate the online/cloud and commercial
         | options.
         | 
         | When you self-host, it becomes your job to fix it when it
         | breaks.
        
           | j45 wrote:
           | Yup, as you mentioned, there's other alternatives to Gitlab
           | lcaolly that are decent.
           | 
           | I'm finding myself liking and using gitlab more and more when
           | I come back to it every 6-8 months.
           | 
           | I don't know how I'd be able to trust only a cloud for my
           | source code and devops/CI/CD. At least a mirrored setup in a
           | private or hybrid cloud on another provider as a failover
           | that isn't with the same cloud provider.
        
       | ryandv wrote:
       | Funny, because just yesterday I was downvoted for pointing out
       | (among other things) GitHub's less than stellar reliability these
       | past few years.
       | 
       | When are the AI vibe coders going to create a GitHub replacement?
       | With 1000x AI productivity a lean startup should easily
       | outcompete the incumbents, no?
        
         | numbsafari wrote:
         | Yeah, especially if you deploy it on Azure...
        
       | gmerc wrote:
       | Is this a good time to mention forgejo as a self hosted
       | alternative?
        
         | numbsafari wrote:
         | It's a great time.
        
         | phkahler wrote:
         | You got my attention, so why didn't you provide a link?
        
           | sigio wrote:
           | https://forgejo.org/ or https://codeberg.org/
        
         | jeltz wrote:
         | How does it compare to Gitlab?
        
           | dzogchen wrote:
           | Much simpler. Much less features. Completely open source and
           | not only the core.
        
             | jeltz wrote:
             | Any important feature from Gitlab you feel is missing? I
             | personally think Gitlab has way more features than I need
             | but maybe there are some important ones I would miss.
        
               | makkesk8 wrote:
               | Running Gitlab in any kind of scale beyond a single
               | server is a major PITA. And it's very poorly optimized.
        
               | jeltz wrote:
               | That I am well aware of. I hate running Gitlab. I jsut
               | wonder what different features different people are
               | missing.
        
               | appease7727 wrote:
               | Gods, for some reason GitLab consumes 5-10% of a CPU _at
               | all times_. I spent weeks trying to get it to calm down
               | to reduce our AWS spend. Absolutely no changes no matter
               | what I tried. On my 2013 Xeon server at home it 's even
               | worse.
               | 
               | GitLab is great, I really do enjoy working with it. I
               | _hate_ running it.
        
               | 12_throw_away wrote:
               | Yeah, I love gitlab as a user - but as an admin, the
               | performance feels like something out the 90s. I had to
               | use the gitlab-rails REPL console for something a couple
               | of weeks ago. Even on a server with tons of headroom, it
               | took *10 minutes* to start up?
        
               | styanax wrote:
               | A tough question as everyone's needs are different; I
               | might recommend you create an account on
               | https://codeberg.org as it's the largest, most popular
               | instance of Forgejo running with many FOSS projects
               | hosted there.
               | 
               | Codeberg devs have to disable some features (pull mirrors
               | e.g., only push is allowed to prevent abuse) and they use
               | some custom code (abuse mitigation - spam, etc.) but in
               | general you're getting the latest Foregjo experience
               | "test drive" which only gets better when self hosting
               | when you can use all the features.
        
               | lucb1e wrote:
               | I use git pretty basically, just as a revision system
               | where the hosted version has some nice-to-haves on top
               | like rendering markdown, permalinking bits of code to
               | people, and being able to open tickets and contribute
               | code. Gitea/Forgejo/Codeberg does all of that and I
               | haven't run into any missing features. It's also a _lot_
               | easier to navigate than GitLab, but I 'll admit that's
               | probably just a matter of me not being used to it
               | 
               | Having self-hosted Gitea after considering GitLab, I can
               | also say that the resource consumption of Gitea is a tiny
               | fraction of that of GitLab's. I don't get the impression
               | that their employees care about self hosters beyond as a
               | gateway for enterprise sysadmins to get it running
               | quickly before doing some big installation
        
               | WhyNotHugo wrote:
               | I deal with GitLab a lot. Both the official instance and
               | third party instances.
               | 
               | It drives me crazy how slow it is. A lot of operations
               | take minutes. Eg: I push commits to a branch and open an
               | MR. During 2-3 minutes, the MR will indicate that no
               | changes were found. When I push new changes, it can also
               | take minutes or update, so I can't quickly check that it
               | all looks correct.
               | 
               | The latest release changed their issues UI, so when you
               | try to open an issue, it's opened on a floating panel on
               | the right 30% of the screen. I've no idea what exotic use
               | case this addresses, but when I click a link, just open
               | it. The browser does it find. No need to reinvent
               | navigation like this. Now to open an issue, I need to
               | wait for this slow floating UI to load before I can
               | _actually_ navigate to the page. Which will also be
               | extremely slow.
               | 
               | Don't even get me started on the UI. Buttons are hidden
               | all over the place. Obvious links are behind obscure
               | abstract menus. At this point, I remember where all the
               | basic stuff is, but I can understand why newcomers
               | struggle so much.
               | 
               | Hosting GitLab is also really resource intensive. For a
               | small team of 2-3 people, I don't think you can get away
               | with "just" 8GB of ram.
               | 
               | ---
               | 
               | I do have to admit, GitLab CI is pretty good, assuming
               | that you're fine with just Docker support and don't need
               | to support BSD or some exotic platforms.
        
             | homebrewer wrote:
             | Depends on your needs. Last time I checked, Gitlab wanted
             | money for e.g. assigning multiple PR reviewers, which is
             | available in gitea/forgejo.
             | 
             | The real issue with gitea/forgejo compared to Gitlab is
             | their terrible CI, which is (to some approximation) a clone
             | of GitHub Actions, also a dumpster fire for those of us
             | proficient with/preferring the UNIX command line. You'll
             | probably need a separate CI runner, like Woodpecker or
             | Drone.
        
               | jeltz wrote:
               | Gitlab CI is so much better than Github Actions. With
               | some additional improvements Gitlab CI could become
               | amazing.
        
               | zamalek wrote:
               | CI is one area that it's "lacking." I quote that because,
               | honestly, all the bells and whistles in these CI yamls
               | are starting to hurt. Woodpecker[1] (what forgejo uses)
               | is strikingly simple.
               | 
               | [1]: https://woodpecker-ci.org/
        
         | yogsototh wrote:
         | I host a forgejo instance and I feel it is great to embrace the
         | distributed nature of git.
         | 
         | But be aware if you intend to host it you will need to protect
         | it from recent AI web scrapers. I use anubis but there are
         | other alternatives.
        
       | everfrustrated wrote:
       | Enterprise customers, remember to email your sales rep and ask
       | for them to report on their contracted uptime with you that you
       | are allowed to do as per contract. They wont do this unless you
       | ask hoping you don't notice the outages. It creates lots of
       | internal pain - they have no automation internally for reporting
       | on this.
       | 
       | This is the only way anything will ever change. GitHub is
       | _easily_ the most unreliable SaaS product. There's not a week
       | whereby we aren't affected by an outage. Their reputation is mud.
        
         | petcat wrote:
         | > GitHub is _easily_ the most unreliable SaaS product.
         | 
         | Some of us are stuck using Atlassian and BitBucket and it is by
         | far worse in every way.
        
           | __natty__ wrote:
           | Agree, atlassian products are much worse in terms of
           | reliability.
        
             | enraged_camel wrote:
             | We use Jira. It's a horrendous product, but I cannot
             | remember the last time it was down, unlike Github.
        
               | ta1243 wrote:
               | I use self-hosted jira, it's a great product, but I have
               | full control over my teams tasks and workflows and as a
               | tiny team we make them work for us (subject, description,
               | comments, occasional linking to other tickets, assigned
               | to, and status of "open", "blocked" or "done")
               | 
               | Most of the problems I hear about are micromanaging
               | product managers. That's not the fault of the tool itself
               | per-se.
        
           | hkt wrote:
           | Amen, BitBucket outages are regular and showstopping. Self
           | hosting is genuinely more reliable.
        
             | ta1243 wrote:
             | Noooo!! It's impossible to get three nines uptime when you
             | self host something on a single raspberry pi, I read it on
             | the internet so it must be true.
        
             | bargainbin wrote:
             | Ah, you clearly haven't worked with the self hosting teams
             | that I have.
             | 
             | I hope I never again have to explain to someone that you
             | can't just "restore the code from the weekly database
             | backup" because the code is in the file system they just
             | osmosed.
        
           | sigio wrote:
           | It's also _by_far_ the cheapest, and most git-work can be
           | done offline, so while it's inconvenient, it's not stopping
           | all operations here.
        
             | ta1243 wrote:
             | Depends how intergrated you are. If you're using it as a
             | code repository fine, if you're tying your workflows into
             | it with pull requests, actions, maybe a third party CI
             | which ties to it, and use it as part of operations then
             | it's a major problem
             | 
             | I just approved a PR which added a user to one of our AWS
             | accounts for example, if github is down then that PR can't
             | be approved, the update can't work and the user can't
             | access that account
        
               | Nicook wrote:
               | I mean you can always work around it with the correct
               | permissions right.
        
           | weberer wrote:
           | I've only had good experiences with Gitlab.
        
             | guywithahat wrote:
             | Funny, I've had the worst experience with gitlab. Bitbucket
             | is the best experience I've had so far
        
           | zemo wrote:
           | I used GitHub for years in the tech industry, then went into
           | the games industry and used BitBucket and hated it, thought
           | it was such a downgrade. Now I'm back in the tech industry
           | and using GitHub, and I miss BitBucket.
        
             | nickitolas wrote:
             | Is games not a part of tech?
        
               | krs_ wrote:
               | Of course, but there are some oddities in tool use
               | compared to other industries. At my job we use Perforce
               | for version control for example, which I think is more
               | common in the game industry than other solutions for
               | whatever reason. Naturally everyone here hates it.
        
               | phlakaton wrote:
               | But not everybody here has to try and manage many GB or
               | even TB of assets in their VCS. I wager game company
               | build/dev engineers know what they are doing in picking
               | Perforce.
        
               | __float wrote:
               | It is a _decision_ to put those assets in the same VCS as
               | your source code. It's not one you are required to make.
        
               | Wowfunhappy wrote:
               | ...maybe, but there a good reason not to make that
               | decision, assuming you have a VCS that can manage large
               | files?
               | 
               | I am very much not in this industry, but it seems to me
               | that if the assets and code depend on one another, you'd
               | want to keep them together.
        
             | psygn89 wrote:
             | I liked the UI of BitBucket more. Stuff I accessed
             | frequently like commits and branches were tabs across the
             | top, easy to reach from any page. Branch dropdown sort
             | order was by most recently updated unlike GitHub where I
             | have to search for it. Easy to diff files. This was like 4
             | or 5 years ago though, maybe it has gone through
             | modernization/enshittification. GitHub feels a bit
             | fragmented and it tries to be more performant by
             | virtualizing some things but while BitBucket in some sense
             | was more rudimentary and showed it all (bogging my machine
             | down some), it allowed me to CTRL + F easily with more
             | confidence whereas with virtualization I've had issues with
             | it finding things and I couldn't 100% trust it.
        
             | bpye wrote:
             | > then went into the games industry and used BitBucket and
             | hated it
             | 
             | At least it wasn't Perforce?
        
             | dosethree wrote:
             | Bitbucket is butt
        
             | lesuorac wrote:
             | Starting to pretty much desire tools that can do nothing
             | but are just fast at their core competency.
             | 
             | Looking at PRs in github and then when toggling to the
             | "files" tab it chocking up or being like "I don't want to
             | display this file because its more than 100 lines" is like
             | wtf you're whole point is to show me modified files.
        
               | FredPret wrote:
               | Like the Unix philosophy, but for businesses.
               | 
               | Come to think of it, this might be great advice for life
               | in general: do one thing very well, and be modular (aka
               | play well with others)
        
               | Analemma_ wrote:
               | I wish the world worked this way, but I don't think it
               | does, especially in tech. If you "do one thing well", the
               | cloud hyperscalers will use their billions to copy
               | whatever that is, and add your "one good thing" into
               | their bundled subscriptions or cloud plans. At which
               | point, any rational CTO will go "why should we pay for
               | this, when we're already getting it via
               | AWS/O365/whatever, and with better integration with our
               | existing tooling to boot?"
               | 
               | I don't think "do one thing well" can succeed in this
               | world, which is why Atlassian, Dropbox, etc. keep on
               | launching things like office suites even though that
               | makes no sense considering their core competencies. It's
               | the only way not be streamrolled by FAANG.
        
               | MoreQARespect wrote:
               | It works with Keiretsu. Ive long thought that this is how
               | Europe should play catch up and build its own
               | equivalent(s) of AWS, GCP and Azure.
        
               | agloe_dreams wrote:
               | I'm about to sound crazy.
               | 
               | Github's problem is that it isn't a SPA. It is a massive
               | Ruby on rails project that is all server-rendered.
               | Everything you do needs to be synchronous and almost
               | everything requires a reload. A react or angular app with
               | great restraint would be dramatically faster at all of
               | this as viewing a file is just an API call - not a page
               | reload. They are stuck with their hands tied as loading
               | large data would cause the whole page load to be delayed
               | - thus silly limits.
               | 
               | Many things should not be webapps... but an app on the
               | web like this...probably should.
        
               | lpapez wrote:
               | You can have parts of the web app rendered on the client,
               | and still keep the rest of the app the same. Rewrite the
               | diffs and previews, keep the rest as-is.
               | 
               | There is no excuse for possibly the most used feature of
               | Github to suck so badly.
        
               | cyrilou242 wrote:
               | > Everything you do needs to be synchronous and almost
               | everything requires a reload.
               | 
               | this is pretty incorrect, you may want to look into the
               | concept of "partials" in SSR. maybe you meant everything
               | requires a roundtrip ? but SPA would not solve most of
               | the roundtrips necessary in github given many
               | interactions in the github app require authn/authz
               | checks.
               | 
               | would you care getting into more details ?
               | 
               | Also, 'old' github was known to be very fast an reliable
               | and was indeed a ruby on rails SSR app. Since a few years
               | ago github started to introduce react and more client
               | side logic and it _correlates_ with more issues and more
               | slowness in the frontend. It only _correlates_ , but
               | still.
        
               | kirici wrote:
               | I am increasingly in favor of inspecting/diffing branches
               | from MRs locally.
        
           | at-fates-hands wrote:
           | Isn't Sourcetree an Atlassian product? I used that for a
           | while when my company outlawed Github and it seemed to do a
           | good job.
        
           | throwzasdf wrote:
           | Atlassian Jira and Confluence rock. Can't recall ever using
           | BitBucket but Atlassians's products are top notch.
        
           | JanMa wrote:
           | I used to maintain a self hosted instance of BitBucket and
           | the user experience of it was actually very nice. We shut it
           | down when Atlassian deprecated the self-hosted licenses.
           | Moving to GitHub and GitHub Actions felt like a downgrade in
           | more than a few ways
        
           | pmontra wrote:
           | Two customers of mine have been using Bitbucket and other
           | Atlassian products. I remember a problem a few months ago,
           | nothing else. Maybe I've been lucky, no accesses during the
           | outages.
        
           | mmcnl wrote:
           | Bitbucket is quite nice actually. It's got very little bloat
           | and just... works?
        
         | cddotdotslash wrote:
         | Companies should automate this. Write their own outage
         | monitoring, feed the results, plus the cumbersome format you
         | have to send to the provider, into an LLM, have it spit out an
         | email requesting SLA credits or whatever the contract
         | specifies.
         | 
         | Probably not worth it for low cost services, but if you're
         | paying GitHub $x millions per year, maybe it is.
        
           | colechristensen wrote:
           | They intentionally underreport outages. Everybody does. When
           | your performance metrics for your customers, managers, and
           | individual contributors all include uptime, what you get
           | isn't better uptime but lies about uptime.
        
           | colinbartlett wrote:
           | Some customers of my product, StatusGator, do this with our
           | API. They can extract the outage data -- including the time
           | when we detect the outage before its acknowledged. And then
           | use that to get SLA credits.
        
             | ta1243 wrote:
             | Why would I trust you to report
             | 
             | Its great that your specific product does this, but as a
             | whole I have to monitor the service separately to keep you
             | honest (well not you specifically, I'm sure you are honest
             | and do as much as you can to be honest, but not every
             | company is), and of course to monitor the problems I have
             | which you don't detect.
        
               | edoceo wrote:
               | Gotta get a monitor for the monitor, then a manger for
               | the monitors, and a manager to manage the managers of
               | monitors.
        
             | WD-42 wrote:
             | I think that was sarcasm
        
           | dehrmann wrote:
           | Obviously you should use a SaaS for SaaS uptime monitoring.
           | No need to build this yourself.
        
             | FinnKuhn wrote:
             | You can also self-host something like Prometheus or Uptime-
             | Kuma.
        
         | RandallBrown wrote:
         | I've had much better luck with GitHub than GitLab and whatever
         | Atlassian is calling their source control these days.
         | 
         | Still sounds like good advice though.
        
         | sneak wrote:
         | The way you change this is not by pressuring Microsoft to be
         | better or less of a shitty company.
         | 
         | The way that you change this is by switching to a different
         | forge host, or by self-hosting Gitea.
         | 
         | I do so, and it's simple and painless and cheap, and this
         | quarter my uptime is better than this multinational's.
        
           | xyst wrote:
           | this, but unfortunately many Fortune 500 are so deep in the
           | MSFT stack. It would take many years to migrate off.
        
         | frmrghr wrote:
         | Former githubber anon posting a non main acct
         | 
         | You all should be running a small private git
         | 
         | Most teams could get buy with something like a tiny instance
         | with snapshots every commit
         | 
         | AWS has too much skin in the game to be as unreliable as they
         | used to be.
         | 
         | There's zero reason for a startup to use all these services
         | anymore. The only reason they ever existed was big government
         | manipulation of the labor market through ZIRP
         | 
         | It's far more set n forget to self host git than github will be
        
         | xyst wrote:
         | All this does is make some poor offshore schmuck toil away for
         | hours trying to get this data.
         | 
         | If companies begin to _cancel_ their contracts with MSFT/GH
         | because of a breach of SLAs, then maybe conditions will
         | improve.
         | 
         | Reality: companies locked into multi year deals with MSFT
         | including a MSFT-shit suite and windows licenses.
         | 
         | Migrating away from it will be expensive. MS knows this. Thus
         | the reason why nothing will change.
        
         | zulban wrote:
         | > GitHub is _easily_ the most unreliable SaaS product.
         | 
         | I'm no fan of Microsoft either but when you say ridiculous
         | things it's hard to take you seriously.
        
           | foobarchu wrote:
           | Is it that much hyperbole, assuming we ignore small fry SaaS?
           | I've personally noticed at least three outages in the last
           | few weeks alone.
           | 
           | Sure it's less impactful than some services since you don't
           | need access to the website at all times, but the reliability
           | is still really bad.
        
             | Wowfunhappy wrote:
             | > Is it that much hyperbole, assuming we ignore small fry
             | SaaS?
             | 
             | Well there's Claude for starters.
        
         | ugh123 wrote:
         | Customers should also then compare what the sales guy is
         | telling you to your own metrics, and see how far off they are.
        
       | ab71e5 wrote:
       | Ah was wondering why pull requests did not show up
        
       | gethly wrote:
       | I've always used Bitbucket as it allows private repositories, so
       | Github was never something I wanted to use. But it is one of the
       | most important websites in the world for tech people and should
       | be run better than this, especially being now owned by the
       | largest tech company in the world. On the other hand, it just
       | shows that centralisation, or over-reliance on one thing or
       | service, is always the worst idea. But people are very lazy and
       | so we keep running in these circles ad infinitum.
        
         | clintonb wrote:
         | Do you mean _free_ private repos? GitHub has allowed free
         | private repos for a few years now.
        
           | gethly wrote:
           | I have been using bitbucket before it got acquired by
           | atlassian, which was in 2010, so i am sure github changed
           | quite a bit since then. Even though i do have a github
           | account, i don't use it for anything else other than creating
           | or commenting on issues for other repos. So i have no clue
           | about present day github capabilities as i am satisfied with
           | bitbucket and had no need to explore github in depth.
        
         | masklinn wrote:
         | Github switched from unlimited users and per-repo fees to
         | unlimited private repositories and paying per-seat 10 years ago
         | or so: https://github.blog/news-insights/product-
         | news/introducing-u...
        
           | mattbruv wrote:
           | Man, I remember feeling like that change was somewhat recent.
           | 10 years ago was about 2016. I'm not ready to accept this.
        
       | notnmeyer wrote:
       | anybody have a GH alternative they like? bonus points awarded for
       | not being a straight clone of GH.
        
         | astrolx wrote:
         | forgejo [1] works well for me. It can be self-hosted, otherwise
         | e.g Codeberg [2] runs a good instance [2]
         | 
         | [1] https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/
        
         | nerdypepper wrote:
         | https://tangled.sh?
         | 
         | social features via atprotocol, native jujutsu support, stacked
         | PRs, interdiffs, light weight to selfhost, nix-based CI.
        
         | Aldipower wrote:
         | Gitlab of course. It's mature.
        
       | havkom wrote:
       | Does this matter much? Git is a "distributed source control
       | system". Are you using git in the wrong way? :)
        
         | tracker1 wrote:
         | Well, considering git is only version control, and github does
         | much more... pull requests, social interaction,
         | workers/workflows, ci/cd etc. It's kind of a big deal.
         | 
         | Unless you have some sort of decentralized method of doing
         | CI/CD and pull requests I'm unaware of?
        
       | ngoldbaum wrote:
       | I wonder why the github status page has an atlassian cookie
       | request pop-up.
        
         | mbb70 wrote:
         | The status page is a SaaS product called StatusPage, acquired
         | by Atlassian in 2016.
        
       | taude wrote:
       | git was designed as a distributed vcs for high-latency connected
       | developers with plenty of ability to work offline.
       | 
       | I don't think I've really been impacted by any of the outages.
       | Maybe I wait an extra hour to merge a feature or something, in
       | which case I actually get to eat lunch and browse HN, doesn't
       | feel quite as catastrophic for me, as some of you.
        
         | petcat wrote:
         | The problem is that people design their entire development and
         | release lifecyle to be dependent on Github. A lot of times they
         | can't even push code hotfixes to production without it. It's a
         | terrible SPOF for a lot of engineering orgs.
        
           | taude wrote:
           | The hotfixes makes sense.
        
           | lucb1e wrote:
           | We also started having customers since a few years that
           | declare GitHub fully trusted, as in, it is simply not worth
           | considering what the impact would be if that vendor gets
           | compromised. I can't name names, but this includes a vendor
           | that aims to prevent supply chain attacks (technically
           | language-agnostic; in practice aiming to be the solution
           | chosen by one of the biggest programming language's package
           | manager)
           | 
           | > can't even push code hotfixes to production without it.
           | It's a terrible SPOF
           | 
           | GitHub's _availability_ impact is the least of my concerns
           | these days. It 'll be a really tough year for society
           | worldwide if we need to rebuild loads of infrastructure after
           | some threat actor got into github and managed to change key
           | pieces of code without being detected a couple of years.
           | Having seen how hospitals handle updates, they might get
           | lucky and be old enough to not be affected yet, or have a
           | really tough time recovering due to understaffed IT
           | 
           | No clue how to even begin solving this since our OSes are
           | likely all pulling dependencies from GitHub without
           | verification of the developer's PGP key, if the project even
           | has that and applies it correctly. I guess I can only
           | recommend being aware of the problem and doing what you can
           | in your own organization to reduce the impact
        
         | dymk wrote:
         | GitHub is everything in addition to the git hosting. Issue
         | tracking, code review, CI, artifact hosting, wiki+docs, kanban
         | board.
        
           | taude wrote:
           | That makes sense, I wasn't sure how "all in" everyone is on
           | these other features that are only github centric.
        
         | koiueo wrote:
         | GitHub isn't just git, it's also a CI, a project management
         | tool/issues tracker...
        
         | Joe_Cool wrote:
         | It also has pretty neat support for emailing patches. And it's
         | practically impossible to lose data as long as any single dev
         | still has an intact .git directory.
         | 
         | Nobody is preventing the devs from just setting up a second
         | "upstream" and pushing to both github and gitlab (for example)
         | or any other service at the same time.
        
       | adobrawy wrote:
       | In meantime, I recommend to read their availability reports on
       | their blog, published monthly: https://github.blog/news-
       | insights/company-news/
        
       | bob1029 wrote:
       | I've been working on a self-hosted alternative to GitHub and I am
       | curious what HN finds to be the most important features. I think
       | Code, Issues and PRs are the critical aspects, but I don't know
       | what typical workflows look like for others these days.
       | 
       | It seems like there are some teams that have figured out a way to
       | turn GH into a labyrinth of CI/CD actions that allegedly produces
       | a ton of business value, but I don't know how typical this kind
       | of use case is. If the average GH user just needs the essentials,
       | I could easily focus those verticals down and spend more time on
       | things like SAML/OIDC, reporting APIs, _performance_ , etc. I
       | suspect there aren't a whole lot of developers who are finding
       | things like first party AI integration to be indispensable.
        
         | justinrubek wrote:
         | I don't think it's the features that are lacking from the
         | alternatives. It's the network effects.
        
         | iN7h33nD wrote:
         | Have you seen: https://forgejo.org/
        
           | neilv wrote:
           | I like what I've used of Forgejo (Git, Issues+Board, Wiki),
           | and have hosted it on servers and localhost easily. I haven't
           | tried its CI features yet.
           | 
           | Codeberg is a cloud site for open source projects that runs
           | Forgejo.
           | 
           | Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which is another option,
           | especially if you want commercial support, but I haven't
           | tried it yet.
           | 
           | I also kinda like GitLab, both the cloud one and the
           | enterprise on-prem version. And their issue label features
           | work more easily with the board than Forgejo's (automatically
           | moving issues between columns based on scoped labels). Though
           | their pricing tiers have been unfortunate at times (I don't
           | know latest).
        
         | gazook89 wrote:
         | Any time I see this topic brought up, two things are always
         | mentioned: the "hub" part, meaning the discoverability and
         | social aspect, and the "network effect" of having everyone use
         | a single service (so everyone already has an account and they
         | don't have to create additional account for every self-hosted
         | project.
        
           | tracker1 wrote:
           | Agreed, it's definitely the network cohesion that keeps GH
           | together. Especially for FLOSS. For advanced features, there
           | are some niceties that say Azure DevOps offers that GH
           | Enterprise still lacks, though it feels like there's some
           | convergence on the backend.
           | 
           | I like GH Actions myself, though sometimes it can get a
           | little cumbersome with self-hosted workers on
           | private/enterprise projects. I'm a big fan of automation and
           | like to keep related bits closer together. As opposed to
           | alternatives that have completely detached
           | workflows/deployments.
        
         | sneak wrote:
         | I use and love Gitea. Why not contribute to that or the other
         | fork vs making another?
        
       | sashank_1509 wrote:
       | I'm at Google, we have a million + file codebase. Every piece of
       | code is snapshotted (no need to commit, automatic snapshot
       | whenever a change is made). Every line of code has its own unique
       | URL (this is for your branch too, not just overall). Background
       | tests running nonstop hourly. Never seen any downtime. The infra
       | at Google is insane
        
         | chaz6 wrote:
         | Without manual commits, is there any way to record the
         | intention of each change?
        
           | sashank_1509 wrote:
           | Yes you can still commit as a logical delineation of changes.
           | And every commit is automatically a PR, folding multiple
           | commits is possible but not the common workflow, they prefer
           | just reviewing and approving each commit.
        
           | Balinares wrote:
           | There are manual commits, they're just called changelists.
        
         | sequin wrote:
         | GitHub is a completely different scale. If Google hadn't wasted
         | its opportunities to become the prime source code platform
         | they'd also have issues.
        
       | CoderJoshDK wrote:
       | With continued reliability issues and the CEO stepping down, now
       | feels like such an opportune time for a competitor to start
       | taking market share. I sure am rooting for it!
       | 
       | For the longest time, I thought that there was absolutely no way
       | for some of these corner stone companies (slash tech) to be
       | toppled. And I'm very impressed with their ability to destroy
       | consumer trust!
        
         | colechristensen wrote:
         | Sadly gitlab lacked focus especially on software quality.
        
         | shrinks99 wrote:
         | Between Tangled, GitLab, Codeburg (Forgejo), and Gitea there's
         | quite a lot of decent alternatives now compared to when GitHub
         | first sold to MS. Having the entire world of FOSS integrated in
         | one development platform was convenient but I'm more excited by
         | the possibilities for more innovation in the space.
        
           | Lammy wrote:
           | And Phorge! (former Phabricator, and my favorite)
           | https://we.phorge.it/
        
       | alphazard wrote:
       | Everyone impacted by this outage should take a look at Radicle,
       | which was also on the front page today.
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44874945
       | 
       | I'm not affiliated with Radicle in any way. I am just impressed
       | with the technology.
        
       | joshred wrote:
       | Sooo....
       | 
       | What's the consensus on gitlab?
        
         | tracker1 wrote:
         | I've used their public site for a few private projects, mostly
         | in habit from when private projects in GH were limited to paid
         | accounts. The collaboration was a bit better at that time imo.
         | 
         | I'm not sure that I would choose it for self-hosting over
         | gitea, forgejo or straight up ssh+git on a remote system, which
         | works well enought for a personal backup target.
        
       | mattbruv wrote:
       | This is just embarrassing for them, especially whoever is in
       | charge of pull requests.
        
       | sigio wrote:
       | Just completed one or our (quarterly) github exports before this
       | hit... If people are looking into extracting everything from
       | their organisations, i've published the scripts I use:
       | https://github.com/sigio/github-export
        
       | irthomasthomas wrote:
       | Any one else smile for a moment when they saw their issues list
       | empty? Don't rush to fix it ;)
        
       | gdcbe wrote:
       | Maybe they should focus less on "agentic" and more on just
       | keeping their core product solid... I suppose that doesn't rhyme
       | with growth at all cost... zzz sad... it is
        
       | asim wrote:
       | Too many unnecessary features at this point perhaps. Self hosting
       | might be a good alternative. Don't need the UI.
        
       | JyB wrote:
       | I'm really wondering what internally causes this. No one likes it
       | when they have outages, but it keeps happening. Is this a culture
       | thing? Like pressure to ship features fast? Some under staffed
       | teams or lack of ownership on some crucial components?
        
         | tracker1 wrote:
         | Definitely all good questions. I've noticed that there seems to
         | be a bit of convergence between Azure DevOps and Github
         | (Enterprise) and am curious how co-mingled the teams or
         | management are at any given level or not.
         | 
         | I'm mixed on the cultural changes at MS and have historically
         | preferred GH's approach. I'm hoping MS moves closer to GH than
         | the reverse. I'm not working with/at either company and don't
         | really have a lot of insights to offer other than observations
         | from the outside.
        
       | jewel wrote:
       | I used to work at a place that had a second copy of all the git
       | repositories on a server, available over ssh. We could push there
       | and then, at deploy time, instruct the servers to pull from that
       | repo instead of bitbucket.
       | 
       | If I were to set up the same thing again today, I'd add some
       | automation to automatically keep it in sync with github as well
       | as automate the servers so that they'd attempt to pull from both
       | on every deploy.
       | 
       | I share this as an idea for those who need an emergency or backup
       | deploy mechanism.
        
       | yoyohello13 wrote:
       | Just saying. Our company has been on self-hosted Gitlab for
       | years. We have one devops guy who spends like an hour a month
       | managing the server. Never one outage.
        
       | jonator wrote:
       | If you're reading this there's a great opportunity to pull a
       | Linear move and disrupt the entrenched players with a 10x better
       | UX. Although the hardest nut to crack here are the network
       | effects.
        
       | demarq wrote:
       | What's the hardest part of making a git hosting service?
        
         | Culonavirus wrote:
         | There's a book about this.
         | https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9211847-how-hard-can-it-...
        
       | Aldipower wrote:
       | Used and using Gitlab with success in all of my companies. It is
       | maybe a bit boring and a little bit slow, but it is enterprise
       | and has everything you need. Included time on the market..
        
       | e-dant wrote:
       | I like github
        
       | WhyNotHugo wrote:
       | The linked page doesn't say much. Just "increased latency". No
       | more details than that. Am I missing something?
        
       | alfiedotwtf wrote:
       | Didn't GitHub fire a bunch of developers recently because AI was
       | a silver bullet?
        
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       (page generated 2025-08-12 23:02 UTC)