[HN Gopher] GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three ni...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines
       availability
        
       Author : richtr
       Score  : 421 points
       Date   : 2026-03-23 10:39 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
        
       | pilif wrote:
       | see also: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-
       | migrating-to-a...
       | 
       | A migration like this is a monumental undertaking to the level of
       | where the only sensible way to do a migration like this is
       | probably to not do it. I fully expect even worse reliability over
       | the next few years before it'll get better.
        
       | embedding-shape wrote:
       | From GitHub CTO in 2025 when they announced they're moving
       | everything to Azure instead of letting GitHub's infrastructure
       | remain independent:
       | 
       | > For us, availability is job #1, and this migration ensures
       | GitHub remains the fast, reliable platform developers depend on
       | 
       | That went about as well as everyone thought back then.
       | 
       | Does anyone else remember back in ~2014-2015 sometime, when half
       | the community was screaming at GitHub to "please be faster at
       | adding more features"? I wish we could get back to platforms (or
       | OSes for that matter) focusing in reliability and stability.
       | Seems those days are long gone.
        
         | awestroke wrote:
         | Perhaps when they switch over fully to Azure they'll forget to
         | disable IPv6 access. One can dream
        
         | comboy wrote:
         | I think stability and reliability have vastly improved over the
         | last years in general (not necessarily talking about gh
         | specifically)
         | 
         | It's just that everybody is using 100 tools and dependencies
         | which themselves depend on 50 others to be working.
        
         | braiamp wrote:
         | > I wish we could get back to platforms (or OSes for that
         | matter) focusing in reliability and stability
         | 
         | That's only a valid sentiment if you only use the big players.
         | Both of those have medium/smaller competitors that have shown
         | (for decades) that they are extremely boring, therefore stable.
        
           | PxldLtd wrote:
           | Try convincing the CTO that this panoply of smaller players
           | will be around for 5yrs or worth the effort migrating to.
           | 
           | I'm at a much smaller outfit now so we have more freedom but
           | I'd dread to think the arguments I would've had at the 4000+
           | employee companies I was at before.
        
           | SlinkyOnStairs wrote:
           | In that same period the big players have only gotten bigger
           | and the "Mittelstand" in tech has been practically dying.
           | Replaced by the flood of VC startups that are far too
           | obsessed with "growth" to care about reliability and
           | stability.
           | 
           | (Note that "is this company financially viable in the long
           | term future" is an important part of stability. Doesn't
           | matter how rock solid the software is if the startup's
           | bankrupt by the end of next year.)
        
         | __alexs wrote:
         | GitHub have not really got much better at adding new features
         | either though :(
        
           | carlmr wrote:
           | They added the service unavailable feature.
        
           | embedding-shape wrote:
           | This was before Actions and a whole lot of other non-git
           | related stuff. There was years (maybe even a decade?) where
           | GitHub essentially was unchanged besides fixes and small
           | incremental improvements, long time ago :)
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | GH Actions was good for them as another billable feature,
             | but I'm skeptical we actually gained much over external CI
             | providers
             | 
             | The improvements to PR review have been nice though
        
               | cozzyd wrote:
               | Don't forget the security implications if you host your
               | own actions runner.
        
               | embedding-shape wrote:
               | > The improvements to PR review have been nice though
               | 
               | I dunno, probably the worst UX downgrade so far, almost
               | no PRs are "fully available" on page load, but requires
               | additional clicks and scrolling to "unlock" all the
               | context, kind of sucks.
               | 
               | Used to be you loaded the PR diff and you actually saw
               | the full diff, except really large files. You could do
               | CTRL+F and search for stuff, you didn't need to click to
               | expand even small files. Reviewing medium/large PRs is
               | just borderline obnoxious today on GH.
        
               | epistasis wrote:
               | I find it impossible to use the current diff view for
               | most codebases, and spend tons of time clicking open all
               | available sections...
               | 
               | They have somehow found the worst possible amount of
               | context for doing review. I tend to pull everything down
               | to VS Code if I want to have any confidence these days.
        
             | jmaw wrote:
             | Back in the day when software could be "finished". Ahh, the
             | good 'ol days
        
           | phyzome wrote:
           | I don't know, it's nice that they finally broke native
           | browser in-page search. That's a great feature for people who
           | hate finding things.
        
             | cozzyd wrote:
             | Makes you actually read the code!
        
               | vulcan01 wrote:
               | Intended usage is to use Edge Copilot to search the page
               | for you.
        
             | omnimus wrote:
             | I work on lots of smaller client projects - usually named
             | by the hostname. I absolutely don't understand how at some
             | point the github search got so great it became unable to
             | find my own repo by its name.
             | 
             | We have since switched to self hosted Forgejo instance.
             | Unsurprisingly the search works.
        
             | BenjiWiebe wrote:
             | Native browser in-page search is working for me, on
             | Firefox. Is this a browser-specific change or is it a
             | staged rollout coming my way soon?
        
               | phyzome wrote:
               | Firefox for me as well. It's dodgy on some pages, but on
               | larger PRs it now breaks.
        
           | williamdclt wrote:
           | They definitely have. Github evolved a lot faster after the
           | microsoft acquisition, I remember being mildly impressed
           | after it was stagnant for years (this is not an opinion on
           | whether it was evolving in the right direction or if it was a
           | good trade-off)
        
             | __alexs wrote:
             | No they were slow at doing features before, and they are
             | still slow afterwards.
        
         | zahlman wrote:
         | That's about when I joined, and all I really remember thinking
         | was that it was cool that I could now share my repo publicly
         | without having to try and run a server from a residential IP.
        
       | Eikon wrote:
       | As of recently (workflows worked for months) I even have part of
       | my CI on actions that fails with [0]
       | 
       | 2026-02-27T10:11:51.1425380Z ##[error]The runner has received a
       | shutdown signal. This can happen when the runner service is
       | stopped, or a manually started runner is canceled.
       | 2026-02-27T10:11:56.2331271Z ##[error]The operation was canceled.
       | 
       | I had to disable the workflows.
       | 
       | GitHub support response has been
       | 
       | " We recommend reviewing the specific job step this occurs at to
       | identify any areas where you can lessen parallel operations and
       | CPU/memory consumption at one time."
       | 
       | That plus other various issues makes me start to think about
       | alternatives, and it would have never occurred to me one year
       | back.
       | 
       | [0]
       | https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS/actions/runs/22480743922/job...
        
         | PxldLtd wrote:
         | We've jumped ship to self-hosted Jenkins. Woodpecker CI looks
         | cool but Jenkins seemed like a safer bet for us. It's been well
         | worth the effort and it's simplified and sped up our CI
         | massively.
         | 
         | Once we got the email that they were going to charge for self-
         | hosted runners that was the final nail in the coffin for us.
         | They walked it back but we've lost faith entirely in the
         | platform and vision.
        
           | thwarted wrote:
           | Charging for self-hosted runners is like a corkage fee but
           | you still need to open the bottle yourself.
        
           | maccard wrote:
           | I don't know what's worse - in 2026 someone genuinely
           | suggesting Jenkins as a viable GHA alternative, or me
           | agreeing with that.
           | 
           | Jenkins has possibly the worst user experience of any piece
           | of software I've had to use in the last few years. It's slow,
           | brittle, somehow both heavyweight and has no features,
           | littered with security vulns due to architecture, is
           | impossible to navigate, has absolutely no standardisation for
           | usage.
           | 
           | And yet it's still more reliable than GHA.
        
           | hrmtst93837 wrote:
           | Jenkins has a long tail of pain.
           | 
           | CI "simplification" there gets stale fast once plugins age
           | out of sync, upgrades turn into archaeology, and some random
           | maintainer vanishes. Losing faith in GitHub is one thing, but
           | paying an engineer to babysit CI infra every week is usually
           | a worse deal than the SaaS bill.
        
       | sammy2255 wrote:
       | I wonder if they are still running on a single MySQL machine
        
         | _heimdall wrote:
         | The article mentions some concerns related to migrating their
         | MySQL clusters off bare metal.
        
         | andrew_mason1 wrote:
         | They are not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xl24s_0mZs
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | Ever since Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub 8 years ago, GitHub
       | has completely enshittified and has become so unreliable, that
       | even self-hosting a Git repository or self-hosted actions
       | yourself would have a far better uptime than GitHub.
       | 
       | This sounded crazy in 2020 when I said that in [0]. Now it
       | doesn't in 2026 and many have realized how unreliable GitHub has
       | become.
       | 
       | If there was a prediction market on the next time GitHub would
       | have at least one major outage per week, you would be making a
       | lot of money since it appears that AI chatbots such as Tay.ai,
       | Zoe and Copilot are somewhat in charge of wrecking the platform.
       | 
       | Any other platform wouldn't tolerate such outages.
       | 
       | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
        
       | _pdp_ wrote:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47315878
        
       | _heimdall wrote:
       | I'm surprised GitHub got by acting fairly independently inside
       | Microsoft for so long. I'm also surprised GitHub employees
       | expected that to last
       | 
       | The real problem today IMO is that Microsoft waited so long to
       | drop the charade that they now felt like they had to rip the
       | bandaid. From what I've heard the transition hasn't gone very
       | smoothly at all, and they've mostly been given tight deadlines
       | with little to no help from Microsoft counterparts.
        
         | eterm wrote:
         | If this were a place for memes, then I'd share that swimming
         | pool meme with Microsoft holding up copilot while GitHub is
         | drowning.
         | 
         | Then Azure Dev Ops (formerly known as Visual Studio Team
         | System) dead o n the ocean floor.
         | 
         | Although given how badly GitHub seems to be doing, perhaps it's
         | better to be ignored.
        
           | sixeyes wrote:
           | why is az devops on the floor? i am having to choose between
           | the clients existing az dops and our internal gitlab for
           | where to host a pipeline, and i don't know what would be good
           | at all
        
             | eterm wrote:
             | It works fine,it just feels like it has been under a kind
             | of maintenance mode for a while.
             | 
             | There's clearly one small team that works on it. There are
             | pros and cons to that.
             | 
             | It hasn't even got an obnoxious Copilot button yet for
             | example, but on the other hand it was only relatively
             | recently you could properly edit comments in markdown.
             | 
             | If the client has existing AzDo Pipelines then I'd suggest
             | keeping them there.
        
         | MoreQARespect wrote:
         | It operated with an independent CEO for a long while.
         | 
         | When I saw his interview: https://thenewstack.io/github-ceo-on-
         | why-well-still-need-hum... i thought "oh, there is some
         | semblance of sanity at Microsoft".
         | 
         | This was after seeing those ridiculous PRs where microsoft
         | engineers patiently deconstructed AI slop PRs they were forced
         | to deal with on the open source repos they maintained.
         | 
         | When he was gone a few months later and github was folded into
         | microsoft's org chart the writing was firmly on the wall.
        
           | _heimdall wrote:
           | He was never truly independent though. The org structure was
           | such that the GitHub CEO reported up through a Microsoft VP
           | and Satya. He was never really a CEO after the acquisition,
           | it was in name only.
           | 
           | Also of note is that the Microsoft org chart always showed
           | GitHub in that structure while the org chart available to
           | GitHub stopped at their CEO. Its not that they were finally
           | rolled into Microsoft's org chart so much as they lifted the
           | veil and stopped pretending.
        
             | MoreQARespect wrote:
             | I never said he was "truly independent" nor meant to imply
             | it.
             | 
             | Nonetheless it looks like he was both willing and able to
             | push back on a good deal of the AI stupidity raining down
             | from above and then he was removed and then, well, this...
        
       | bentobean wrote:
       | "Microsoft Tentacle" - Now there's a name for a new product line.
        
         | asimovDev wrote:
         | this comment reminded me that GitKraken was a thing. And still
         | is, apparently
        
       | yurii_l wrote:
       | Maybe they need to improve release strategy with Copilot AI
       | Review =)
        
       | cedws wrote:
       | While GitHub obsess over shoving AI into everything, the rest of
       | the platform is genuinely crumbling and its security flaws are
       | being abused to cause massive damage. Last week Aqua Security was
       | breached and a few repositories it owns were infected. The threat
       | actors abused widespread use of mutable references in GitHub
       | Actions, which the community has been screaming about for years,
       | to infect potentially thousands of CI runs. They also abused an
       | issue GitHub has acknowledged but refused to fix that allows
       | smuggling malicious Action references into workflows that look
       | harmless.
       | 
       | GHA can't even be called Swiss cheese anymore, it's so much worse
       | than that. Major overhauls are needed. The best we've got is
       | Immutable Releases which are opt in on a per-repository basis.
        
         | ljm wrote:
         | I worry that CI just got overcomplicated by default when
         | providers started rocking up with templated YAML and various
         | abstractions over it to add dynamic behaviour, dependencies,
         | and so on.
         | 
         | Perhaps mixing the CI with the CD made that worse because
         | usually deployment and delivery has complexities of its own.
         | Back in the day you'd probably use Jenkins for the delivery
         | piece, and the E2E nightlies, and use something more
         | lightweight for running your tests and linters.
         | 
         | For that part I feel like all you need, really, is to be able
         | to run a suite of well structured shell scripts. Maybe if
         | you're in git you follow its hooks convention to execute
         | scripts in a directory named after the repo event or something.
         | Forget about creating reusable 'actions' which depend on
         | running untrusted code.
         | 
         | Provide some baked in utilities to help with reporting status,
         | caching, saving junit files and what have you.
         | 
         | The only thing that remains is setting up a base image with all
         | your tooling in it. Docker does that, and is probably the only
         | bit where you'd have to accept relying on untrusted third
         | parties, unless you can scan them and store your own cached
         | version of it.
         | 
         | I make it sound simpler than it is but for some reason we
         | accepted distributed YAML-based balls of mud for the system
         | that is critical to deploying our code, that has unsupervised
         | access to almost everything. And people are now hooking AI
         | agents into it.
        
           | Hasnep wrote:
           | I'm trying out SelfCI [1] for one of my projects and it's
           | similar to what you were describing. My whole CI pipeline is
           | just a shell script that runs the actual build and test
           | commands, I can write a script in another language like
           | python if I need more complexity and I can run it all locally
           | at any time to debug.
           | 
           | [1] https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad%3Az2tDzY
           | bAX...
        
           | jmaw wrote:
           | You could use these shell script versions of pipelines in GHA
           | though, right? There is nothing stopping you from triggering
           | a bash script via a "run" step in YAML.
           | 
           | These reusable actions are nothing but a convenience feature.
           | This discussion isn't much different than any other supply
           | chain, dependency, or packaging system vulnerability such as
           | NPM, etc.
           | 
           | One slight disclaimer here is the ability of someone to run
           | their own updated copy of an action when making a PR. Which
           | could be used to exfil secrets. This one is NOT related to
           | being dependent on unverified actions though.
           | 
           | (re-reading this came across as more harsh than I intended..
           | my bad on that. But am I missing something or is this the
           | same issue that every open-source user-submitted package
           | repository runs in to?)
        
         | a-french-anon wrote:
         | If you want more ammo for your ranting (no offense meant, I
         | also rant): an issue as massive as
         | https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/142308 lingering
         | for years should do the trick.
        
           | llimllib wrote:
           | It really feels like Firefox is not a supported browser on
           | GitHub, I hit this and also find that much of the time the
           | commit message is not correctly pulled from the PR
           | description when that setting is enabled
        
             | mrguyorama wrote:
             | Meanwhile, bitbucket has never given us problems with
             | several of our team using Firefox
        
           | NewJazz wrote:
           | * no ipv6 support
           | 
           | * no ff merge support
           | 
           | * no sha2 commit hash support
        
             | bigfishrunning wrote:
             | to be fair, git itself only supports sha256 (as opposed to
             | all of sha2) and even then it's marked "THIS OPTION IS
             | EXPERIMENTAL" so many are afraid to use it
             | 
             | ff merge support though....what a world that would be
        
           | dijksterhuis wrote:
           | i had something similar with PRs last year. 2x PRs of mine
           | disappeared for me. they were still counted in the total
           | number of PRs and everyone else could see them.
           | 
           | 0_o
        
         | tasuki wrote:
         | > GHA can't even be called Swiss cheese anymore, it's so much
         | worse than that.
         | 
         | That's a high bar though. Few things are better than Swiss
         | cheese.
        
           | jjgreen wrote:
           | Salers (if you can find it)
        
         | imglorp wrote:
         | Public service announcement
         | 
         | You can pin actions versions to their hash. Some might say this
         | is a best practice for now. It looks like this, where the
         | comment says where the hash is supposed to point.
         | Old -->   uses: actions/checkout@v4           New -->   uses:
         | actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683 # v4
         | 
         | There is a tool to sweep through your repo and automate this:
         | https://github.com/mheap/pin-github-action
        
           | lijok wrote:
           | The problem is
           | actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683
           | probably doesn't do this same pinning, and the actions
           | ecosystem is such an intertwined mess that any single
           | compromised action can propagate to the rest
        
             | derfniw wrote:
             | Well, it is a git commit hash of the action repo that
             | contains the transpiled/bundled javascript.
             | 
             | Like: https://github.com/actions/checkout/tree/11bd71901bbe
             | 5b1630c...
             | 
             | So I'm pretty sure that for the same commit hash, I'll be
             | executing the same content.
        
               | hobofan wrote:
               | This is true specifically for actions/checkout, but
               | composite actions can have other actions as dependencies,
               | and unless the composite action pins the versions of its
               | dependencies, it is vulnerable for this attack.
               | 
               | This article[0] gives a good overview of the challenges,
               | and also has a link to a concrete attack where this was
               | exploited.
               | 
               | [0]: https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/github-actions-
               | package-manager...
        
             | imglorp wrote:
             | Yes, true, but at least the fire won't spread through this
             | one point. Hopefully all of your upstreams can be persuaded
             | to pin also.
        
               | franktankbank wrote:
               | Doesn't a single compromised action in the chain cause
               | the whole to be fucked? Pinning the top level doesn't
               | prevent any spread.
        
               | teaearlgraycold wrote:
               | Might want to vendor everything?
        
               | franktankbank wrote:
               | I don't know what this means in this context.
        
               | teaearlgraycold wrote:
               | Make copies of the entire GitHub action dependency tree.
        
           | kanzure wrote:
           | I've always been worried about their backend changing and
           | somehow named tags with a previous commit hash working for an
           | attacker to give something you didn't expect for the commit
           | hash.
        
           | woodruffw wrote:
           | See also pinact[1], gha-update[2], and zizmor's unpinned-
           | uses[3].
           | 
           | The main desiderata with these kinds of action pinning tools
           | is that they (1) leave a tag comment, (2) leave that comment
           | in a _format_ that Dependabot and /or Renovate understands
           | for bumping purposes, and (3) actually put the _full_ tag in
           | the comment, rather than the cutesy short tag that GitHub
           | encourages people to make mutable (v4.x.y instead of v4).
           | 
           | [1]: https://github.com/suzuki-shunsuke/pinact
           | 
           | [2]: https://github.com/davidism/gha-update
           | 
           | [3]: https://docs.zizmor.sh/audits/#unpinned-uses
        
           | rtaylorgarlock wrote:
           | My preferred tool to solve these issues is called 'gitlab'
        
             | righthand wrote:
             | CircleCI
             | 
             | TravisCI
             | 
             | Jenkins
             | 
             | scripts dir
             | 
             | Etc
        
               | b00ty4breakfast wrote:
               | yeah, github's business model is not really a git
               | repository but a bunch of other (admittedly useful) stuff
               | that traps people in their ecosystem.
        
             | saxonww wrote:
             | Does it solve anything? I don't see this as a GitHub
             | problem, it's a "we built a dependency management system
             | with untrusted publishers" problem.
             | 
             | GitLab's `include` feature has the same concern. They do
             | offer an integrity check, but it's not any more capable
             | than hash pinning to a commit.
             | 
             | Fundamentally, if you offer a way to extend your product
             | with externally-provided components, and you can't control
             | the external publishers, then you've left the door open to
             | 'these issues'.
        
           | silverwind wrote:
           | This won't pin the action's dependencies, so it's a shallow
           | approach only.
        
           | stefan_ wrote:
           | Checkout v4 of course, released in August 2025, which already
           | now pollutes my CI status with garbage warnings about some
           | Node version being deprecated I could absolutely care less
           | about. I swear half the problems of GitHub are because half
           | that organization has some braindead obsession with upgrading
           | everything everywhere all the time, delivering such great
           | early slop experiments as "dependabot".
        
           | OJFord wrote:
           | > There is a tool to sweep through your repo and automate
           | this: [third-party]
           | 
           | Dependabot, too.
        
       | pluc wrote:
       | I'm amazed Microslop let us keep GitHub this long. Probably
       | because they're training AI on it? To have a direct line to
       | developers? I don't see why else they would've bothered with
       | something that was so anti everything they stood for
        
         | g947o wrote:
         | What does Microsoft stand for?
        
           | cozzyd wrote:
           | Making Incrementally Crappier Repositories, Operating
           | Systems, Office and any Future Technology
        
             | jmaw wrote:
             | you misspelled MicroSlop
        
           | pluc wrote:
           | Control. Gatekeeping. Profits. Proprietary technology.
           | Licenses.
        
       | martinald wrote:
       | I wonder how much of this is down to the massive amount of new
       | repos and commits (of good or bad quality!) from the coding
       | agents. I believe that the App Store is struggling to keep up
       | with (mostly manual tbf) app reviews now, with sharp increases in
       | review times.
       | 
       | I find it hard to believe that an Azure migration would be that
       | detrimental to performance, especially with no doubt "unlimited
       | credit" to play with?
       | 
       | You can provision Linux machines easily on Azure and... that's
       | all you need? Or is the thinking that without bare metal NVMe
       | mySQL it can't cope (which is a bit of a different problem tbf).
        
         | garettmd wrote:
         | I think part of the issue is that Azure has been struggling to
         | reliably provision Linux VMs. Whether that's due to increased
         | load, poor operational execution, or a combination of them,
         | it's hard for anyone on the outside to know.
        
         | grafporno wrote:
         | This reminds me of when i looked up how many actions runs the
         | openclaw repo triggers. 700k as of now.
        
       | cl0ckt0wer wrote:
       | Cheap, fast, and good. I see which two they chose.
        
         | akshitgaur2005 wrote:
         | They didn't even choose two, only one :)
        
         | bengale wrote:
         | Two?
        
       | mikeve wrote:
       | Just to add a little bit of nuance to this not because I'm trying
       | to defend GitHub, they definitely need to up their reliability,
       | but the 90% uptime figure represents every single service that
       | GitHub offers being online 90% of the time. You don't need every
       | single service to be online in order to use GitHub. For example,
       | I don't use Copilot myself and it's seen a 96.47% uptime, the
       | worst of the services which are tracked.
        
         | crote wrote:
         | On the other hand: it also doesn't include instances where
         | GitHub is painfully slow but _technically_ usable.
         | 
         | These days it is very common that something like opening the
         | diff view of a trivial PR takes 15-30 seconds to load. Sure, it
         | _will_ eventually load after a long wait or an F5, but it is
         | still negatively impacting my productivity.
        
         | klabb3 wrote:
         | > Copilot [has] seen a 96.47% uptime
         | 
         | That's... one 9 of reliability. You could argue the title
         | understates the problem.
         | 
         | > You don't need every single service to be online in order to
         | use GitHub.
         | 
         | Well that's how they want you to use it, so it's an epic
         | failure in their intended use story. Another way to put this is
         | "if you use more GitHub features, your overall reliability goes
         | down significantly and unpredictably".
         | 
         | Look, I have never been obsessed with nines for most types of
         | services. But the cloud service providers certainly were using
         | it as major selling/bragging points until it got boring and old
         | because of LLMs. Same with security. And GitHub is so upstream
         | that downstream effects can propagate and cascade quite
         | seriously.
        
         | pier25 wrote:
         | 96% is horrible uptime though
        
         | ruszki wrote:
         | Here is the same thing in 2019:
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20190510070456/https://www.githu...
         | 
         | It seems that the same metric is about a magnitude worse than
         | before.
        
         | dijksterhuis wrote:
         | more context -- their enterprise SLA is 99.9% (3x9) uptime for
         | individual services
         | 
         | https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
         | 
         | > GitHub commits to maintain at least 99.9% Uptime for the
         | applicable GitHub service.
         | 
         | ... and none of the individual services have hit 99.9% uptime
         | in the last 90 days according to this site. 0_o
        
         | PunchyHamster wrote:
         | the basic git services are at one nine of availability
        
         | anon7000 wrote:
         | There have been multiple outages in the past year where they
         | didn't even fully report it very quickly. I'm talking the types
         | of outages that brings down normal enterprise usage: we hook
         | delivery for CI/CD, git operations for everyone, PRs for code
         | review. And that's not even including GitHub actions or copilot
         | which lots of people also rely on.
        
       | dijit wrote:
       | I'm surprised it's even as _high_ as _three_ nines, at one point
       | in 2025 it was below 90%; not even a single nine.[0] (which, to
       | be fair includes co-pilot, which is the worst of availabilities).
       | 
       | People on lobsters a month ago were congratulating Github on
       | achieving a single nine of uptime.[1]
       | 
       | I make jokes about putting all our eggs in one basket under the
       | guise of "nobody got fired for buying x; but there are sure a lot
       | of unemployed people"- but I think there's an insidious
       | conversation that always used to erupt:
       | 
       | "Hey, take it easy on them, it's super hard to do ops at this
       | scale".
       | 
       | Which lands hard on my ears when the normal argument _in favour_
       | of centralising everything is that "you can't hope to run things
       | as good as they do, since there's economies of scale".
       | 
       | These two things can't be true simultaneously.. this is the
       | evidence.
       | 
       | [0]: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
       | 
       | [1]:
       | https://lobste.rs/s/00edzp/missing_github_status_page#c_3cxe...
        
         | tpmoney wrote:
         | > These two things can't be true simultaneously
         | 
         | Sure they can. Perhaps a useful example of something like this
         | would be to consider cryptography. Crypto is ridiculously
         | complex and difficult to do correctly. Most individual
         | developers have no hope of producing good cryptographic code on
         | the same scale and dependability of the big crypto libraries
         | and organizations. At the same time these central libraries and
         | organizations have bugs, mistakes and weaknesses that can and
         | do cause big problems for people. None of that changes the fact
         | that for most developers "rolling your own crypto" is a bad
         | idea.
        
           | dijit wrote:
           | That's an excellent example. OpenSSL, by virtue of trying to
           | do _everything_ is the most buggy implementation of TLS
           | generally available today leading to the point where there
           | have been hard forks designed to reduce the scope to limit
           | this damage.
           | 
           | I'd go so far as to say that there are more crypto libraries
           | than there are "default" options for SaaS Git VCS (Gitlab and
           | Github are the mainstay in companies and _maybe_ Azure Devops
           | if you hate your staff- nobody sensible is using bitbucket)
           | but for TLS implementations there's RustTLS, GnuTLS,
           | BoringSSL, LibreSSL, WolfSSL, NSS, and AWS-LC that come to
           | mind _immediately_.
        
       | iwontberude wrote:
       | Three nines is more than enough
        
         | Ygg2 wrote:
         | In the future, no one will need more than one and a half nines.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | It's time to look for a decentralized Non-Hub alternative.
        
         | AlienRobot wrote:
         | Github without hub? I don't think that exists.
        
           | bigDinosaur wrote:
           | Email?
        
             | amelius wrote:
             | More like Git, without the Hub. Perhaps the Hub aspects can
             | be stored in Git as well?
        
               | esafak wrote:
               | https://radicle.xyz/
        
       | William_BB wrote:
       | To me, Github has always seemed well positioned to be a one-stop
       | solution for software development: code, CI/CD, documentation,
       | ticket tracking, project management etc. Could anyone explain
       | where they failed? I keep hearing that Github is terrible
        
         | CharlieDigital wrote:
         | We use GH and are investing more in the platform features.
         | 
         | Codespaces specifically is quite good for agent heavy teams.
         | Launch a full stack runtime for PRs that are agent owned.
         | >  keep hearing that Github is terrible
         | 
         | I do not doubt people are having issues and I'm sure there have
         | been outages and problems, but none that have affected my work
         | for weeks.
         | 
         | GH is many things to many teams and my sense is that some parts
         | of it are currently less stable than others. But the overall
         | package is still quite good and delivers a lot of value, IMO.
         | 
         | There is a bit of an echo chamber effect with GH to some
         | degree.
        
           | maccard wrote:
           | We use GitHub actions and we have more build failures from
           | actions than we do any other source.
        
         | conartist6 wrote:
         | It always starts out good enough, but the reason they pursue
         | horizontal integration is that it ensures that you won't be
         | able to get out even if (when) you eventually want to. You'll
         | be as glued as a fly to flypaper.
         | 
         | That's the reason you hear the complaints: they're from people
         | who no longer want to be using this product but have no choice.
         | 
         | Because Microsoft doesn't need to innovate or even provide good
         | service to keep the flies glued, they do what they've been
         | doing: focus all their resources on making the glue stickier
         | rather than focusing on making people want to stay even if they
         | had an option to leave.
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | They got acquired by Microsoft.
        
       | kgwxd wrote:
       | Just use git, problem solved.
        
       | ankit7000 wrote:
       | "Agreed on the echo chamber point. For solo indie projects the
       | overhead of GH Actions adds up though -- I moved to self-hosted
       | deploys and cut the complexity significantly. Different tradeoffs
       | for teams vs solo."
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | Have anyone checked out the status page? It's actually way worse
       | than I thought, I believe this is the first time I am actually
       | witnessing a status page with truly horrible results.
       | 
       | https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses
        
         | apetresc wrote:
         | Well then clearly you haven't taken a look at
         | https://status.claude.com.
        
           | bombcar wrote:
           | This is ... surprisingly honest? The one above is "missing"
           | status page; and most status pages would legally have to be
           | filed in the "fiction" section of the library.
        
           | dathinab wrote:
           | At that 3rd party side GH is currently noticeable worse then
           | claude ...
           | 
           | Like they are down to one 9 availability and very very close
           | to losing that to (90.2x%).
           | 
           | This also fit more closely to my personal experience, then
           | the 99.900-99.989 range the article indicates...
           | 
           | Through honestly 99.9% means 8.76h downtime a year, if we say
           | no more then 20min down time per 3 hours (sliding window),
           | and no more then 1h a day, and >50% downtime being
           | (localized) off-working hours (e.g. night, Sat,Sun) then
           | 99.9% is something you can work with. Sure it would sometimes
           | be slightly annoying. But should not cause any real issues.
           | 
           | On the other hand 90.21%... That is 35.73h outage a year.
           | Probably still fine if for each location the working hour
           | availability is 99.95% and the previous constraints are
           | there. But uh, wtf. that just isn't right for a company of
           | that size.
        
             | kbelder wrote:
             | You may have fumbled the calculator at one point. 20Min per
             | 3 hours is 88.8% uptime. 99.9% uptime is 11 seconds down.
        
               | dathinab wrote:
               | what I meant is having both at the same time
               | 
               | - at most 20min per 3 hour
               | 
               | - and 99.9% uptime on a yearly basis
               | 
               | as in your yearly budged of outage is ~8.76h but that
               | budged shouldn't happen all at once and if there is an
               | outage it at most delays works by 20min at a time, and
               | not directly again after you had a downtime
               | 
               | but I did fumble the 90.21% part, which is ~35.73 days
               | i.e. over 857 hours....
        
             | zahlman wrote:
             | > On the other hand 90.21%... That is 35.73h outage a year.
             | 
             | Days, not hours.
        
           | ctmnt wrote:
           | I get the email notifications from Anthropic's status
           | monitor, and I think they might be my most frequent emailer
           | these days.
        
         | Octoth0rpe wrote:
         | And notably, that page makes this post's title inaccurate. As
         | of this morning, it says `90.21% uptime`, which is a _single_
         | 9, not 3 (though that's for the platform as a whole, no
         | individual component appears to achieve three 9s.)
        
           | mminer237 wrote:
           | Note that it gets 90% largely off Copilot going down and
           | Actions not working. Actual git has 98.98%, which is still
           | just one 9 but a lot better.
        
             | PunchyHamster wrote:
             | > 98.98%
             | 
             | it's the 2 nines they aimed for
        
               | maverwa wrote:
               | True! Technically even 9.99% would be three nines!
        
               | franktankbank wrote:
               | Too bad they didn't find an irrational number, could have
               | got infinite nines.
        
             | sc68cal wrote:
             | As someone who was impacted by GitHub's git outage in late
             | February, which caused us to cancel a feature release, I am
             | more sensitive to the availability of their git service,
             | than their chatbot.
        
             | maccard wrote:
             | If all I want is actual git, I'm pretty sure I could get
             | much much more than 98.98% uptime. The value of GitHub is
             | actions, issues, PRs. To me, if actions is down GitHub is
             | down
        
           | graypegg wrote:
           | Hey! At least that single 9 is in the ten's place. /sarcastic
        
         | raincole wrote:
         | It looks this bad because that includes 'degraded performance,'
         | not just outrage.
        
           | NooneAtAll3 wrote:
           | freudian slip
        
           | ecshafer wrote:
           | Degraded Performance is unavailable as far as I am concerned.
           | If Github has "degraded performance" where it takes 5 minutes
           | to load a PR then that is not good.
        
         | ruszki wrote:
         | Especially compared to its archive page:
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20190510070456/https://www.githu...
         | 
         | 1-4 incidents per month compared to about 1 daily.
        
       | anonym29 wrote:
       | Not owned by companies that help the US Federal Government
       | illegally spy on their own citizens and murder children overseas:
       | 
       | Gitlab
       | 
       | Bitbucket
       | 
       | Sourceforge
       | 
       | Forgejo
       | 
       | Codeberg
       | 
       | Radicle
       | 
       | Launchpad
       | 
       | Owned by companies that help the US Federal Government illegally
       | spy on their own citizens and murder children overseas:
       | 
       | Github
        
         | christoph-heiss wrote:
         | Neither Forgejo nor Codeberg are owned by _any_ company. Very
         | important distinction.
        
         | megous wrote:
         | Codeberg is nice.
        
       | ajhenrydev wrote:
       | I worked on the react team while at GitHub and you could easily
       | tell which pages rendered with react vs which were still using
       | turbo. I wish we took perf more seriously as a culture there
        
         | CodingJeebus wrote:
         | Did react render better than turbo or the opposite? I assume a
         | well-optimized turbo page would perform better
        
           | ajhenrydev wrote:
           | React destroyed perf and used more resources than turbo
        
             | CodingJeebus wrote:
             | That's what I figured and has been my experience as well.
        
             | pier25 wrote:
             | Was there any discussion to use something other than react?
        
       | pscanf wrote:
       | I only use GitHub (and actions) for personal open-source
       | projects, so I can't really complain because I'm getting
       | everything for free1. But even for those projects I recently had
       | to (partially) switch actions to a paid solution2 because
       | GitHub's runners were randomly getting stuck for no discernible
       | reason.
       | 
       | 1 Glossing over the "what they're getting in return" part. 2
       | https://www.warpbuild.com/
        
       | neonihil wrote:
       | Nothing unexpected. Microsoft has a remarkable talent for turning
       | good products into useless ones. Skype is another good showcase
       | of such talent.
        
         | throw10920 wrote:
         | Windows (including Notepad and Explorer), too. I think ~Office~
         | ~Office 365~ ~Microsoft 365~ Copilot 365 is still technically
         | useful despite the insane branding and licensing and AI slop
         | features, but I doubt it'll last much longer.
        
         | narrowtux wrote:
         | When will they introduce GitHub for Business?
        
           | Traubenfuchs wrote:
           | My company is on GitHub Enterprise.
        
           | brummm wrote:
           | That has existed for a long time and predates the MS
           | acquisition. It's called Github Enterprise.
        
       | b00ty4breakfast wrote:
       | Until paying customers start leaving en masse, they will continue
       | to shovel out subpar service.
        
       | e-dant wrote:
       | Think the world would be a better place if 70-80% uptime were
       | more tolerated. We really don't need everything available all the
       | time. More time to talk to each other, to think, more "slow
       | time".
       | 
       | Just don't like the slop that's getting us there.
        
       | Anon1096 wrote:
       | Anyone who used the phrase "measly" in relation to three nines is
       | inadvertently admitting their lack of knowledge in massive
       | systems. 99.9 and 99.95 is the target for some of the most common
       | systems you use all day and is by no means easy to achieve. Even
       | just relying on a couple regional AWS services will put your
       | CEILING at three nines. It's even more embarrassing when people
       | post that one GH uptime tracker that combines many services into
       | 1 single number as if that means anything useful.
        
         | bitmasher9 wrote:
         | Three 9s is a perfectly reasonable bar to expect for services
         | you depend on. Without GitHub my company cannot deploy code.
         | There is no alternative method to patch prod. In addition many
         | development activities are halted, wasting labor costs.
         | 
         | We wouldn't couple so much if we knew reliability would be this
         | low. It will influence future decisions.
        
       | dathinab wrote:
       | wait they still have 3 ninth, it really doesn't feel like that
       | 
       | but then their status center isn't really trust-able anymore and
       | a lot of temporary issues I have been running into seem to be
       | temporary, partial, localized failures which sometimes fall under
       | temp. slow to a point of usability. Temporary served outdated (by
       | >30min) main/head. etc.
       | 
       | so that won't even show up in this statistics
        
       | yifanl wrote:
       | https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ Even ignoring Copilot,
       | they seem to be barely at 2 nines of uptime for any service
       | component.
        
       | flykespice wrote:
       | Why dont they just vibecode their way into stability? /s
        
       | sauercrowd wrote:
       | I'm somewhat surprised with Github's strategy in the AI times.
       | 
       | I understand how appealing it is to build an AI coding agent and
       | all that, but shouldn't they - above everything else - make sure
       | they remain THE platform for code distribution, collaboration and
       | alike? And it doesnt need to be humans, that can be agents as
       | well.
       | 
       | They should serve the AI agent world first and foremost. Cause if
       | they dont pull that off, and dont pull off building one of the
       | best coding agents - whcih so far they didnt - there isn't much
       | left.
       | 
       | There's so many new features needed in this new world. Really
       | unclear why we hear so little about it, while maintainers smack
       | the alarm bell that they're drowning in slop.
        
         | astralasia wrote:
         | Microsoft's real goal is selling Copilot seats and pushing
         | Azure, not building a neutral playground for third-party
         | agents. There is just no money for them in being the backend
         | for someone else's AI. As for the AI spam, GitHub's internal
         | metrics have always been tied to engagement and PR volume.
         | Blocking all that AI slop would instantly drop their growth
         | numbers, so it is easier for them to just pass the cleanup cost
         | onto open-source maintainers.
        
           | sauercrowd wrote:
           | No disagreement here. Just very short sighted.
        
       | m4tthumphrey wrote:
       | GitLab isn't much better right now either unfortunately.
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Feb 10th post OP;
       | 
       | More recently:
       | 
       |  _Addressing GitHub 's recent availability issues_
       | 
       | https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-gi...
       | 
       | (with a smattering of submissions here the last few weeks but no
       | discussion)
        
       | BANRONFANTHE wrote:
       | For solo and small team projects, I've started treating GitHub as
       | distribution rather than infrastructure. Git itself is
       | distributed -- the repo on my machine is the source of truth.
       | Deploy scripts that can run without GitHub Actions. Local backups
       | of anything critical. It's a bit more work upfront, but the peace
       | of mind when you see yet another incident on the status page is
       | worth it.
        
       | lijok wrote:
       | ITT lots of complaining, not much building. Microsoft does not
       | give a fuck what you think - they only care if the revenue line
       | goes up. And the revenue line keeps going up despite this
       | instability. Want to build the next unicorn? Build a GitHub
       | competitor.
        
       | 1970-01-01 wrote:
       | IPv6 ignorance is the canary. There's plenty of architecture
       | ignorance below the surface. The real question is why aren't they
       | failing annual security audits?
       | 
       | https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/organizat...
        
         | PunchyHamster wrote:
         | Coz the audits have same quality as architecture lmfao
        
       | 827a wrote:
       | I don't want to give too much credit to Github, because their
       | uptime is truly horrendous and they need to fix it. But: I've
       | felt like its a little unfair to judge the uptime of company
       | platforms like this; by saying "if any feature at all is down,
       | its all down" and then translating that into 9s for the platform.
       | 
       | I never use Github Copilot; it does go down a lot, if their
       | status page is to be believed; I don't really care when it goes
       | down, because it going down doesn't bring down the rest of
       | Github. I care about Github's uptime ignoring Copilot. Everyone's
       | slice of what they care about is a little different, so the only
       | correct way to speak on Github's uptime is to be precise and
       | probably focus on a lot of the core stuff that tons of people
       | care about and that's been struggling lately: Core git
       | operations, website functionality, api access, actions, etc.
        
         | lucideer wrote:
         | You're right that labelling any outage as "Github is down" is
         | an overgeneralisation, & we should focus on bottlenecks that
         | impact teams in a time sensitive matter, but that isn't the
         | case here. Their most stable service (API) has only two 9s
         | (99.69%).
         | 
         | They're not even struggling to get their average to three 9s,
         | they're struggling to get ANY service to three 9s. They're
         | struggling to get many services to two 9s.
         | 
         | Copilot may be the least stable at one 9, but the services I
         | would consider most critical (Git & Actions) are also at one 9.
        
           | calvinmorrison wrote:
           | ONLY TWO NINES! Meanwhile vital government services here have
           | a whopping 25% availability.
        
             | lucideer wrote:
             | Two things can be bad.
        
             | bigfishrunning wrote:
             | Lemme guess, those government services are run by the
             | lowest bidder?
        
           | ARandomerDude wrote:
           | I love multiple 9s as much as the next guy but that's only 27
           | hours _per year_ of downtime. For a mostly free (for me)
           | service, I 'm thankful.
        
             | wavemode wrote:
             | Most people complaining about uptime aren't free users or
             | open-source developers. It's people whose companies are
             | enterprise GitHub customers. It's a real problem and
             | affects productivity.
        
               | sefrost wrote:
               | GitHub going down during office hours in a large
               | enterprise has knock on effects for hours as well.
               | Especially if you are in a monorepo.
        
             | malfist wrote:
             | If there's only a 9 in availability, they've got a minimum
             | downtime of 87.6 hours per year (98.99999999999999999%)
        
             | skeeter2020 wrote:
             | I'm happy to report that my one-person sysops has
             | successfully hit nine-fives for the 20th year in a row!
        
             | lucideer wrote:
             | Honestly, you're right - 27 87+ (correction from sibling)
             | hours per year is absolutely fine & normal for me &
             | anything I want to run. I personally think it should be
             | fine for everybody.
             | 
             | On the other hand the baseline minimal Github Enterprise
             | plan with no features (no Copilot, GHAS, etc.) runs a
             | medium sized company $1m+ per annum, not including pay-per-
             | use extras like CI minutes. As an individual I'm not the
             | target audience for that invoice, but I can envisage
             | whomever is wanting a couple of 9s to go with it. As a
             | treat.
        
               | maccard wrote:
               | 87 hours a year is 1.5 hours a week. If that 1.5 hour
               | window is when you need to use it it matters a hell of a
               | lot more than if it's 4am on a Sunday.
        
           | toast0 wrote:
           | Nine nines is too hard; my target is eight eights.
        
         | dijksterhuis wrote:
         | > I've felt like its a little unfair to judge the uptime of
         | company platforms like this; by saying "if any feature at all
         | is down, its all down" and then translating that into 9s for
         | the platform.
         | 
         | This is definitely true.
         | 
         | At the same time, none of the individual services has hit 3x9
         | uptime in the last 90 days [0], which is their Enterprise SLA
         | [1] ...
         | 
         | > "Uptime" is the percentage of total possible minutes the
         | applicable GitHub service was available in a given calendar
         | quarter. GitHub commits to maintain at least 99.9% Uptime for
         | the applicable GitHub service.
         | 
         | [0]: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
         | 
         | [1]: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-
         | sla
         | 
         | (may have edited to add links and stuff, can't remember, one of
         | those days)
        
           | windward wrote:
           | So what happens for those enterprise customers now? Is there
           | a meaningful fallout when these services fail to meet their
           | SLAs?
        
             | dijksterhuis wrote:
             | > If GitHub does not meet the SLA, Customer will be
             | entitled to service credit to Customer's account ("Service
             | Credits") based on the calculation below ("Service Credits
             | Calculation").
             | 
             | The linked document in my previous comment has more detail.
        
               | Lalabadie wrote:
               | It's worth adding that big (BIG!) business clients will
               | usually negotiate the terms for going below the SLA
               | threshold. The goal is less to be compensated if it
               | happens, and more to incentivize the provider to _never_
               | let it happen.
        
               | drob518 wrote:
               | Right. Basically, they give you a coupon to lower your
               | cost of future consumption. So, you have to keep
               | consuming the service. If you just leave, you get no
               | rebate. Obviously, very large customers get special
               | deals.
        
         | shimman wrote:
         | This company is part of the portfolio of a $trillion+
         | transnational corporation. The idea that we can't judge them,
         | when they clearly have more resources than 99% of other
         | companies on this planet, doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.
         | 
         | Why defend a company that clearly doesn't care about its
         | customers and see them as a money spigot to suck dry?
        
           | thinkingtoilet wrote:
           | The OP clearly never says we can't judge them. He was
           | speaking to how the uptime is measured. I'm not saying I
           | agree or disgree with the OP but at least address the
           | argument he's making.
        
         | foobiekr wrote:
         | It doesn't help that almost all of the big tech companies
         | talking about 5 9s are lying about it; "Does it respond to the
         | API at all, even with errors? It's up!" and so on. If you spend
         | a lot of time analyzing browser traces you see errors and
         | failures _constantly_ from everyone, even huge companies that
         | brag a lot about their prowess. But it 's "up" even if a shard
         | is completely down.
         | 
         | The five nines tech people usually are talking about is a
         | fiction; the only place where the measure is really real is in
         | networking, specifically service provider networking, otherwise
         | it's often just various ways of cleverly slicing the data to
         | keep the status screen green. A dead giveaway is a gander at
         | the SLAs and all the ways the SLAs are basically worthless for
         | almost everyone in the space.
         | 
         | See also all of the "1 hour response time" SLAs from open
         | source wrapper companies. Yes, in one hour they will create a
         | case and give you case ID. But that's not how they describe it.
        
           | sumtechguy wrote:
           | Thats the rub.
           | 
           | Once you dig into the details what does it mean to have 5 9s?
           | Some systems have a huge surface area of calls and views. If
           | the main web page is down but the entire backend API still is
           | responding fine is that a 'down'? Well sorta. Or what if one
           | misc API that some users only call during onboarding is down
           | does that count? Well technically yes.
           | 
           | It depends on your users and what path they use and what is
           | the general path.
           | 
           | Then add in response times to those down items. Those are
           | usually made up too.
        
         | saxonww wrote:
         | There's a completely reasonable comment by jamiemallers on this
         | thread which is marked as 'dead' even after vouching. Not sure
         | what's going on there.
        
           | masfuerte wrote:
           | Take a look at his comment history.
        
           | zahlman wrote:
           | Presumably what's going on is
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 . It's been
           | quite an issue lately.
        
       | DailyGeo wrote:
       | The availability expectations gap is interesting from an
       | education standpoint. Students are tought that 99.9% sounds
       | impressive without contextualizing what that means in practice --
       | roughly 8 hours of downtime per year. For a platform that
       | millions of developers depend on as critical infrastructure
       | during work hours, that math hits very differently than it does
       | for a consumer app.
        
       | outside2344 wrote:
       | I have a little bit of sympathy for Github because if everyone is
       | like me then they are getting 5-6x the demand they were last year
       | just based on sheer commits alone, not to mention Github Copilot
       | usage.
        
       | jtokoph wrote:
       | Pretty soon, the only 9 they're going to have is the 9 8s...
        
       | jedberg wrote:
       | GitHub is in a tough spot. From what I've heard they've been
       | ordered to move everything to Azure from their long standing
       | dataceners. That is bound to cause issues. Then on top of that
       | they are using AI coders for infra changes (supposedly) which
       | will also add issues.
       | 
       | And then on top of all that, their traffic is probably
       | skyrocketing like mad because of _everyone else_ using AI coders.
       | Look at popular projects -- a few minutes after an issue is filed
       | they have sometimes 10+ patches submitted. All generating PRs and
       | forks and all the things.
       | 
       | That can't be easy on their servers.
       | 
       | I do not envy their reliability team (but having been through
       | this myself, if you're reading this GitHub team, feel free to
       | reach out!).
        
         | nilkn wrote:
         | > Look at popular projects -- a few minutes after an issue is
         | filed they have sometimes 10+ patches submitted. All generating
         | PRs and forks and all the things.
         | 
         | I think this is a really important point that is getting
         | overlooked in most conversations about GitHub's reliability
         | lately.
         | 
         | GitHub was not designed or architected for a world where
         | millions of AI coding agents can trivially generate huge
         | volumes of commits and PRs. This alone is such a huge spike and
         | change in user behavior that it wouldn't be unreasonable to
         | expect even a very well-architected site to struggle with
         | reliability. For GitHub, N 9s of availability pre-AI simply
         | does not mean the same thing as N 9s of availability post-AI.
         | Those are two completely different levels of difficulty, even
         | when N is the same.
        
           | pojzon wrote:
           | Not even talking about how useless it is to create tens of
           | PRs to solve the same issue.
           | 
           | But GitHub karma botting is a thing now.
           | 
           | Remember those elitist ppl who removed answers on
           | stackoverflow coz their answer is better with 90000 answers?
           | 
           | Yup, now they are on GitHub farming karma with bots.
        
       | dzonga wrote:
       | when GitHub moved to react instead of server rendered pages ie
       | erb/turbolinks/pjax was the start to the end.
       | 
       | the pages got slower, rendering became a nightmare.
       | 
       | then they introduced GitHub actions (half baked) - again very
       | unreliable
       | 
       | then they introduced Copilot - again not very reliable
       | 
       | it's easy to see why availability has gone down the drain.
       | 
       | are they still on the rails monolith ? they speak about it less
       | these days ?
        
       | jghn wrote:
       | Why have five nines when you can have nine fives?
        
       | unhidden wrote:
       | The 37 minutes of downtime last week cost us a deploy window
       | during market hours. What's underappreciated: it's not just the
       | raw downtime, it's that every CI/CD pipeline, every webhook,
       | every deployment gate has GitHub as a single point of failure
       | now. The centralization risk is real.
        
       | fHr wrote:
       | Gitlab > Github you techbro msft bay area betas
        
       | caconym_ wrote:
       | Legitimately worse uptime than my self-hosted services. That's
       | pretty funny.
        
       | swisniewski wrote:
       | To be honest, I'm not surprised that GitHub has been having
       | issues.
       | 
       | If you have ever operated GitHub Enterprise Server, it's a
       | nightmare.
       | 
       | It doesn't support active-active. It only supports passive
       | standbys. Minor version upgrades can't be done without downtime,
       | and don't support rollbacks. If you deploy an update, and it has
       | a bug, the only thing you can do is restore from backup leading
       | to data loss.
       | 
       | This is the software they sell to their highest margin customers,
       | and it fails even basic sniff tests of availability.
       | 
       | Data loss for source code is a really big deal.
       | 
       | Downtime for source control is a really big deal.
       | 
       | Anyone that would release such a product with a straight face,
       | clearly doesn't care deeply about availability.
       | 
       | So, the fact that their managed product is also having constant
       | outages isn't surprising.
       | 
       | I think the problem is that they just don't care.
        
         | sc68cal wrote:
         | My $JOB ended up giving up on GHES and migrating to GHEC
         | because of these exact issues.
        
       | Andrei_dev wrote:
       | Our security scanning runs on GitHub Actions -- every PR gets
       | checked before merge. When GitHub goes down, the security gate
       | goes down with it. PRs pile up, devs get impatient, start merging
       | without waiting for checks. That's exactly when bad code gets
       | through. And they keep throwing engineers at Copilot while the
       | stuff that CI/CD actually depends on keeps falling over.
        
         | lvkv wrote:
         | Do you have one or more public examples of this?
        
           | Andrei_dev wrote:
           | Nobody's putting "we skipped checks during an outage" in a
           | public repo. Actions is at one nine though -- 10% downtime.
           | Not sure what more proof you need at that point.
        
       | pacman1337 wrote:
       | The irony no one is talking about: AI makes quality code worse.
       | Was bad enough already so imagine it now. I am expecting many
       | more services to drop from 3 nines to 1 nine.
        
       | kylehotchkiss wrote:
       | https://status.claude.com _anthropic has entered the room_
        
       | mosaibah wrote:
       | the real problem isn't the reliability numbers, it's that GitHub
       | sold itself as an integrated platform, every service you adopt
       | raises the blast radius, teams that treat github like any other
       | external dependency, with fallback runners and artifact mirrors,
       | aren't sweating this
        
       | azalemeth wrote:
       | Embrace, extend, extinguish. Except the last one isn't quite
       | going to plan...
        
       | graphememes wrote:
       | It's wild because they are one of the most used properties on
       | earth and their uptime is actually incredible.
        
         | alfalfasprout wrote:
         | It's not though... it's sitting a hair above 90%
        
           | graphememes wrote:
           | My comment is that I expect it to be more frequent and less
           | given the scale and usage. Quite honestly, we have the most
           | insane expectations about uptime and availability in my
           | opinion. I'm glad that we can meet them. But still, insane.
        
         | MeetingsBrowser wrote:
         | Define incredible.
         | 
         | https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
         | 
         | Overall uptime is 90% (single nine), and the best individual
         | service at 99.8% (two nines).
         | 
         | The core git functionality itself is at 98.98%, which works out
         | to being down roughly a full business day each month.
        
           | graphememes wrote:
           | Not bad
        
             | MeetingsBrowser wrote:
             | At the risk of going recursive, how do you define not bad?
             | 
             | Could be worse?
        
               | graphememes wrote:
               | Yes, and honestly, for it's usage, similar feelings for
               | AWS, not bad. Although, I guess I could ask, are you
               | looking for a rubrick that I follow? Not trying to be
               | inflammatory, just trying to understand what exactly
               | you're looking for.
               | 
               | I am mostly going off of overall usage vs downtime.
        
       | Robdel12 wrote:
       | It is annoying. But I bet they're effectively being DDoS'd every
       | day by AI agents now. I think the past year of that growth has
       | destroyed any of their spare resources. It's not really a scale
       | problem I'd like to work on, tbh. Seems very hard.
       | 
       | Plus, the azure migration.
        
       | pfdietz wrote:
       | Hey, it's better than nine threes.
        
       | malephex wrote:
       | Ruby?
        
         | gfody wrote:
         | I suspect mysql over rails.. I imagine the push for azure is to
         | facilitate migrating from mysql to sql server (azure sql)
        
       | nubinetwork wrote:
       | Has Microsoft fixed teams crashing outlook? It's been broken
       | since Wednesday, and the last thing I heard on Friday was that
       | they were going to wait until Monday... really goes to show how
       | much Microsoft cares these days...
        
       | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
       | There must be a lot of software "engineering" going on at github
        
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