[HN Gopher] Days since last GitHub incident
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Days since last GitHub incident
        
       Author : AquiGorka
       Score  : 187 points
       Date   : 2025-12-11 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github-incidents.pages.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github-incidents.pages.dev)
        
       | _def wrote:
       | woah this time i even caught it before the status page reported
       | something - i thought they were rate-limiting me.
        
         | laurmaedje wrote:
         | It seems to have started slowly. For me, Github releases have
         | failed to serve requests for hours already.
        
         | rienbdj wrote:
         | If GitHub actions break I now assume it's them and not me.
         | GitHub needs to work on stability ahead of AI features.
        
       | udev4096 wrote:
       | Friendly reminder to use https://radicle.xyz!
        
         | GaryBluto wrote:
         | _Friendly reminder_ to stop saying _friendly reminder_ when
         | what you 're saying isn't a reminder.
        
           | echelon wrote:
           | For any ESL folks here -
           | 
           | "Friendly reminder" is typically used for reminding people of
           | common knowledge. Especially for beneficial but inconvenient
           | things that some or most people neglect to do, either because
           | they're annoying, inconvenient, or time consuming. Things for
           | which busy people might need a "wink wink, nudge nudge".
           | 
           | Friendly reminder to floss. Friendly reminder to have your
           | cancer screening. Friendly reminder to check your tires.
           | Friendly reminder to file your taxes early. Friendly reminder
           | to drink more water, eat fiber, etc.
        
             | loloquwowndueo wrote:
             | You're assuming that no native speaker is unfamiliar with
             | the idiom and also that no ESL speaker is familiar with it.
        
       | ZeroConcerns wrote:
       | This is a bit... low-effort, isn't it? I'd at least expect a
       | video of an exasperated Github user walking up to the '# days
       | since the last GitHub incident' board, sliding out the '1' or '2'
       | card, and replacing it with a '0'.
       | 
       | I mean, that joke is as old as the universe (heck, in the brief
       | period that I worked in an office, decades ago, I had a "# days
       | since the last person asked a stupid question" sign to enact the
       | _exact same gag_ )...
        
         | rob74 wrote:
         | Or an octocat standing in front of the board, holding cards
         | from 0 to 7 in its tentacles (with the rest lying on the
         | ground) and looking at them quizzically?
        
           | kermatt wrote:
           | An octocat with zero tentacles?
        
             | queuebert wrote:
             | Base 8 numbering system?
        
         | old_bayes wrote:
         | How can we add AI to this perfectly functional product?
        
           | venturecruelty wrote:
           | Tie it to quarterly performance results!
        
         | llbbdd wrote:
         | I don't use Github Pages so I might be wrong but IMO I think at
         | least part of the joke is that its URL betrays that it's a
         | completely static site.
        
         | Tade0 wrote:
         | I was half-expecting the "days since last" meme - the one with
         | a person smiling awkwardly while clapping with a large four-
         | digit counter in the background showing only zeroes.
        
         | venturecruelty wrote:
         | I used to have a magic 8-ball that people could use when they
         | wanted me to debug their code for them. I think it was broken,
         | though; it kept saying "Outlook good". Must've been a Microsoft
         | magic 8-ball.
        
         | asplake wrote:
         | Very low effort. Couldn't read the text on my iPhone without
         | zooming in. I nearly mistook it for a blank page!
        
       | geophph wrote:
       | Is GitHub deployed using GitHub Actions?
        
         | Oakwhisper wrote:
         | I was talking with some GH sales/marketing engineers last month
         | and they said it deploys with actions, but they have a custom
         | deploy queue
        
           | 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
           | It is a fun bootstrapping problem. How do you firewall enough
           | dedicated resources to stand up your infrastructure if you
           | dogfood your own product. Probably insidiously easy to have a
           | dependency on the production service.
        
             | shakna wrote:
             | An Azure outage took out Office365 the day before
             | CrowdStrike happened. I would not trust Microsoft to get
             | this balance right.
        
       | Lapalux wrote:
       | Oh nice - I'm literally playing around with a site to detect
       | outages for major provides (AWS/cloudflare/github) based on
       | social media/HN posts
        
         | Lapalux wrote:
         | hehe - thank you for helping me Github -
         | https://imgur.com/a/0KqmKpU
        
       | llbbdd wrote:
       | I've gotten accustomed lately to spending a lot of time in the
       | Github Copilot / agent management page. In particular I've been
       | having a lot of fun using agents to browse some of my decade-old
       | throwaway projects; telling it to "setup playwright, write some
       | tests, record screenshots/videos and commit them to the repo"
       | works every time and it's a great way to browse memory lane
       | without spending my own time getting some of these projects
       | building and running again.
       | 
       | However this means I'm now using the Github website and services
       | 1000x more than I was previously, and they're trending towards
       | having coin-flip uptime stats.
       | 
       | If Github sold a $5000 box I could plug into a corner in my house
       | and just use that entire experience locally I'd seriously
       | consider it. I'm guessing maybe I could get partway there by
       | spending twice that on a Mac Pro but I have no idea what the
       | software stack would look like today.
       | 
       | Is there a fully local equivalent out-of-the-box experience that
       | anyone can vouch for? I've used local agents primarily through
       | VSCode, but AFAIK that's limited to running a single active agent
       | over your repo, and obviously limited by the constraints of
       | running on a single M1 laptop I currently use. I know at least
       | some people are managing local fleets of agents in some manner,
       | but I _really_ like how immensely easy Github has made it.
        
         | bastardoperator wrote:
         | They do, it's called GHES.
         | 
         | https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.19/admin/over...
         | 
         | "GitHub Enterprise Server is a self-hosted version of the
         | GitHub platform"
        
           | ModernMech wrote:
           | I've tried getting this set up at my University, it was hell
           | dealing with them. We ended up going with Gitlab.
        
           | verst wrote:
           | That does not include the Copilot related APIs though.
        
           | AceJohnny2 wrote:
           | you're not getting copilot on the self-hosted version, which
           | is what the parent was focusing on.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | None of the open weights models you can run locally will
         | perform at the same level as the hosted frontier models. Some
         | of them are becoming better, but the step-down in output
         | quality is very noticeable for me.
         | 
         | > If Github sold a $5000 box I could plug into a corner in my
         | house and just use that entire experience locally I'd seriously
         | consider it. I'm guessing maybe I could get partway there by
         | spending twice that on a Mac Pro but I have no idea what the
         | software stack would look like today.
         | 
         | Right now, the only reasons to host LLMs locally are if you
         | want to do it as a hobby or you are sensitive about data
         | leaving your local network. If you only want a substitute for
         | Copilot when GitHub is down, any of the hosted LLMs will work
         | right away with no up front investment and lower overall cost.
         | Most IDEs and text editors have built-in support for connecting
         | to other hosted models or installing plugins for it.
         | 
         | > I know at least some people are managing local fleets of
         | agents in some manner,
         | 
         | If your goal is to run fleets of agents in parallel, local LLM
         | hosting is going to be a bottleneck. Familiarize yourself with
         | some of the different tool options out their (Claude Code,
         | Cline, even the new Mistral Vibe) and sign up for their cloud
         | API. You can also check OpenRouter for some more options. The
         | cloud hosted LLMs will absorb parallel requests without
         | problem.
        
           | llbbdd wrote:
           | Thank you, a bit sad to hear that local inference isn't
           | really at this level of performance yet. I was previously
           | using the VSCode agent chat and playing with both OpenAI and
           | Github hosted models but I switched to using the Github web
           | UI directly a lot since my workflow became a lot more
           | issue/PR-focused. Sounds like I should probably tighten up
           | the more generic IDE-centric workflow and make it a keyboard
           | shortcut to switch around when a given provider is down. I
           | haven't actually used Claude directly yet but I think Github
           | agents often use it under the hood anyway.
        
         | colechristensen wrote:
         | An NVIDIA DGX Spark is $4000, pair that with a relatively cheap
         | second box to run GitLab in the corner and you would have
         | pretty good local AI inference setup. (you'd probably have to
         | write a nontrivial amount of software to get your setup where
         | you want)
         | 
         | The local models are just right on the edge of being really
         | useful, there's a tipping point to where accuracy is high
         | enough so that getting things done is easy vs models getting
         | continuously stuck. We're in the neighborhood.
         | 
         | Alternatively, just have local GitLab and use one of the many
         | APIs, those are much more stable than github. Honestly just get
         | yourself a Claude subscription.
        
           | llbbdd wrote:
           | I can't say I'm not tempted looking at the Spark, I could
           | probably save some cash on heating my house with that thing.
           | Though yeah unless there's some good software already built
           | around a similar LLM workflow I could use it'd probably be
           | wasted on me, or spend its time desperately trying to pay for
           | itself with crypto mining.
           | 
           | Adding Claude to my rotation is starting to look like the
           | option with the least amount of building the universe from
           | scratch. I have to imagine it can be used in a similar or
           | identical workflow to the Copilot one where it can create PRs
           | and make adjustments in response to feedback etc.
        
             | colechristensen wrote:
             | >Though yeah unless there's some good software already
             | built around a similar LLM workflow I could use it'd
             | probably be wasted on me, or spend its time desperately
             | trying to pay for itself with crypto mining.
             | 
             | A big part of my success using LLMs to build software is
             | building the tools to use LLMs and the LLMs making that
             | tool building easy (and _possible_ ).
        
               | llbbdd wrote:
               | I tried this for a little while and couldn't really get
               | passionate about it; I have too many other backlogged
               | projects that I was eager to tear into with LLMs and I
               | got impatient. That was a while ago though and the ROI
               | for building my own tools has probably gotten a lot more
               | attractive.
        
           | smcleod wrote:
           | The DGX Spark is not good for inference though it's very
           | bandwidth limited - around the same as a lower end MacBook
           | Pro. You're much better off with a Apple silicon for
           | performance and memory size at the moment but I'd recommend
           | holding off until the M5 Max comes out early in the early as
           | the M5 has vastly superior performance to any other Apple
           | silicon chip thanks to its matmul instruction set.
        
             | llbbdd wrote:
             | Oof, I was already considering an upgrade from the M1 but
             | was hoping I couldn't be convinced to go for the top of the
             | line. Is the performance jump from the M# -> M# Max chips
             | that substantial?
        
       | doublerabbit wrote:
       | I've not been able to browse any repo sources without the Unicorn
       | for the past few hours.
        
       | tonymet wrote:
       | This is pretty dishonest because some trivial service no one
       | cares about will reset this counter .
        
         | guywithabike wrote:
         | Your definition of "trivial" is not everyone's definition of
         | trivial.
        
           | bdcravens wrote:
           | True, but the point remains that defining the whole as "down"
           | when a subset is dilutes the value.
        
           | tonymet wrote:
           | github haters (who still use the platform, for free) are the
           | worst
        
       | toastal wrote:
       | This is why I keep encouraging folks to a) have a mirror & b)
       | make sure their tools automatically pick up the mirrors.
       | 
       | I recently got mirror support upstreamed into Nixpkgs for
       | fetchdarcs & fetchpijul which actually work on my just-alpha-
       | released pinning tool, Nixtamal
       | <https://darcs.toastal.in.th/nixtamal/trunk/README.rst>, for just
       | this sort of thing.
        
         | barbazoo wrote:
         | I envy you. Most of us struggle to get the resources to make
         | our actual customer facing applications resilient, let alone
         | our build pipeline.
        
           | toastal wrote:
           | Building your software usually involves getting dependencies,
           | & those dependencies are, hopefully, in more than one
           | location--which includes a cronjob to a bare repo, or Alice's
           | fork on another repo that at least has the latest tags. It
           | should be trivial to point to these as mirrors for the cases
           | where any forge/repository, even the ones held by
           | megacorporations, inevitably go down. Even Nixpkgs itself,
           | while not maintaining their own official mirrors, are
           | mirrored by TUNA. Backups are an important strategy, & the
           | source code should also be a part of that.
        
         | maccard wrote:
         | That's great for the repository, but what about if you're using
         | ghcr, actions, issues, or copilot?
        
           | toastal wrote:
           | These are different concerns. There are a lot of use cases,
           | where folks are just getting dependencies & not interacting
           | with bug tracker or continuous integration use which are less
           | critical & can be accessed later or ran locally.
        
       | ferguess_k wrote:
       | I guess none of us really needs those 9s, and even two 9s are
       | just good enough. I even doubt whether *SOME* of the banking
       | transactions really really really need those 9s too -- like, I
       | don't really mind if 1 out of 100 credit payment doesn't go
       | through so I have to do it again -- it does happen once for a
       | while and I just swiped it again.
        
         | 0xdeafbeef wrote:
         | Retry is fine, but imagine being unable to pay for something
         | within 10 minutes in month. And 10m in 1M is 99.98% sla. So it
         | depends
        
         | dec0dedab0de wrote:
         | I had an ATM glitch out on me a few months ago, I tried again
         | and it confiscated my card. I called, and they explained that
         | it is the failure mode to prevent people modifying them while
         | they're offline.
        
         | tormeh wrote:
         | GitHub has a container registry. That going down can cause pod
         | start failure. I agree the source code probably doesn't need
         | infinite nines, but the container registry is different.
        
           | mystifyingpoi wrote:
           | Which should not even be that hard, because read-only
           | replicas of artifact repos are trivial to create and easy to
           | loadbalance.
        
       | cedws wrote:
       | I found out when Actions started failing again for the Nth time
       | this month.
       | 
       | The internal conversation about moving away from Actions or
       | possibly GitHub has been triggered. I didn't like Zig's post
       | about leaving GitHub because it felt immature, but they weren't
       | wrong. It's decaying.
        
         | DetroitThrow wrote:
         | Combined with security concerns, this made us reconsider even
         | our self-hosted GH Actions last month.
         | 
         | GH Packages is something we're extricating ourselves from after
         | today too. One more outage in the next year and maybe we get
         | the ammunition to move away from GH entirely.
         | 
         | It's still hard to believe that they couldn't even keep the
         | lights on on this thing.
        
         | IgorPartola wrote:
         | The Zig post has since been updated and the objectionable parts
         | have been removed. I think we can put that part to rest.
        
           | landr0id wrote:
           | I have no problem with their opinions but I don't think it
           | should have been said in a Foundation post.
           | 
           | It may have been updated, but nobody is reading the update.
        
         | YetAnotherNick wrote:
         | Idk, if being bad is the reason for leaving Github Actions, I
         | think people would have left it ages ago. It stuck not because
         | it is better than competitors but because it is included in the
         | Github plans. It's decaying implies that it has somehow became
         | worse, in fact it was one of the worst implementation to start
         | with.
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | If you consider that an American maintainer was cheesed off
         | enough to move an entire project off GitHub two days before
         | Thanksgiving then the tone of the original post was completely
         | in line with the energy involved.
         | 
         | Anger is a communication tool. It should absolutely be used
         | when boundaries are being violated. Otherwise you'll get walked
         | all over.
        
           | bilkow wrote:
           | I mostly agree, but a generalized attack at the remaining
           | GitHub workers by calling them "losers" and then "rookies" is
           | unwarranted and leaves a bad taste IMO.
           | 
           | See the edit history here:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46133179
           | 
           | Edit: 1. just to be clear, it's very good that they have
           | accepted the feedback and removed that part, but there's no
           | apology (as far as I know) and it still makes you wonder
           | about the culture. On the other side, people make mistakes
           | under stress. 2. /s/not warranted/unwarranted/
        
         | stefan_ wrote:
         | GitHub has seem to come under the same management as VSCode,
         | everything has to be made AI and that is the only priority.
         | It's like the Google+ of old but stupider.
        
           | chrisandchris wrote:
           | Hopefully with that much AI they can finally make the Explore
           | page more useful than "most stars" and "most recent updated".
           | There seems to be no way to discover stuff on GitHub except
           | knowing where it is (hence not discovering but knowing).
        
       | samcheng wrote:
       | Missed a chance to put this in meme format e.g.
       | https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/439302803/Days-without-acci...
        
       | lawlessone wrote:
       | The amazing part about this is the page even works when i'm
       | offline.
        
       | queuebert wrote:
       | At this point, is there any downside to switching to GitLab?
        
         | loloquwowndueo wrote:
         | What's gitlab?
         | 
         | (Snarky way of saying: GitHub still has huge mindshare and
         | networking effects, dealing with another forge is probably too
         | much friction for a lot of projects)
         | 
         | Not that GitHub doesn't suck...
        
           | burningChrome wrote:
           | When GitHub was bought by Microsoft, Gitlab made moving your
           | repos to them super easy. Apparently not enough people have
           | moved and it would seem even with sustained attacks from all
           | kinds of different vectors, it would seem people continue to
           | stick with them.
           | 
           | I use both Gitlab and Github and have yet to experience any
           | downtime on any of my stuff. I do however, work at a large
           | corporation and the latest NPM bug that hit Github caused
           | enough of a stir where it basically shut down development in
           | all of our lower environments for about two weeks so there's
           | that.
           | 
           | But I do agree, and it seems like their market share
           | increased after the Microsoft acquisition which is contrary
           | to what I heard in all my dev circles because of how uncool
           | MSFT is to many of my friends.
        
         | richardwhiuk wrote:
         | Is the uptime any better?
        
           | burningChrome wrote:
           | Not really:
           | 
           | GitHub - Historically, GitHub reports uptime around 99.95% or
           | higher, which translates to roughly 20-25 minutes of downtime
           | per month. They have a large infrastructure and redundancy,
           | so outages are rare but can happen during major incidents.
           | 
           | GitLab - GitLab also targets 99.95% uptime for its SaaS
           | offering (GitLab.com). However, GitLab has had slightly more
           | frequent service disruptions compared to GitHub in the past,
           | especially during scaling events or major upgrades. For self-
           | hosted GitLab instances, uptime depends heavily on your own
           | infrastructure.
        
         | bdcravens wrote:
         | If escaping downtime is your goal, then you should aim for a
         | service with less downtime than Github. (they're roughly the
         | same, with Gitlab having a slightly higher percentage of
         | "major" outages)
        
         | JackSlateur wrote:
         | Is it any better ?
         | 
         | We had that last year, with the full premium stuff ("pay as
         | much as we can" mindset)
         | 
         | Please see this: a basic feature, much needed by lots of people
         | (those who are stuck on azure ..): https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
         | org/gitlab/-/issues/360592
         | 
         | Please read the entire thread with a particular attention to
         | the timeline
        
       | matheusmoreira wrote:
       | I've been getting some weird cryptocurrency spam notifications on
       | GitHub and they can't be cleared for some reason. Blue dot is
       | gonna be there forever apparently. Some users made an issue out
       | of it but nobody cared to fix it.
        
         | fastball wrote:
         | Same happened to me. You can clear it via the CLI, hilariously.
         | 
         | ```
         | 
         | gh api notifications\?all=true | jq -r 'map(select(.unread) |
         | .id)[]' | xargs -L1 sh -c 'gh api -X PATCH
         | notifications/threads/$0'
         | 
         | ```
        
           | bdcravens wrote:
           | HN doesn't support markdown, but you can "code" format it
           | with 2+ spaces.
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
        
         | dennis-tra wrote:
         | Had the same issue that the blue dot won't disappear. I was
         | able to clear the dot with:
         | 
         | gh api notifications -X PUT -F
         | last_read_at=2025-10-06T00:00:00Z
         | 
         | Just change the date to today. I also got that line from a gh
         | issue somewhere - maybe it was the same issue that you're
         | referring to.
        
         | cassidoo wrote:
         | This should have been fixed here:
         | https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-04-notifications-trigg...
         | 
         | Are you still seeing it, would you mind checking? Our team will
         | get on it if so.
        
           | shakna wrote:
           | I had the same. The dot is cleared on the mobile site. It is
           | present on the desktop site.
        
             | matheusmoreira wrote:
             | Somewhat similar situation here. Cleared cache and logged
             | back in on mobile, dot was fixed. Haven't tested on my
             | laptop yet.
        
               | cassidoo wrote:
               | Thank you all, sharing internally now to get that fixed!
               | Super appreciate the feedback.
        
               | matheusmoreira wrote:
               | Thanks for fixing it!
        
         | ashton314 wrote:
         | Here's how you can clear it:
         | 
         | https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/174310#discuss...
         | 
         | I had the same issue too, and this was the only thing that
         | fixed it for me.
        
       | Aperocky wrote:
       | Once GitHub fully migrates to Azure, it should be known as GitHub
       | 11.
        
         | ragall wrote:
         | Github 3.11 for Workgroups.
        
         | aranw wrote:
         | GitHub Vista Cloud Edition
        
       | TuxPowered wrote:
       | It should always be at 0, because GitHub is unreachable over
       | IPv6, which in 2025 should be considered an incident.
        
         | tonymet wrote:
         | mobile adoption is high, desktop (residential and corporate) is
         | still quite low.
         | 
         | I'm a big advocate for github to add ipv6 support , but let's
         | not pretend it's critical for their business.
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | "yeah but when I turn on ipv6 everything breaks"
        
       | locusofself wrote:
       | The Primagen video about the bash scripts underpinning github
       | actions runner was crazy. I'm a half-assed programmer at best and
       | I don't even think I would make some of those mistakes.
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-11 23:01 UTC)