[HN Gopher] GitHub is once again down
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub is once again down
Author : MattIPv4
Score : 290 points
Date : 2026-03-24 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.githubstatus.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.githubstatus.com)
| MattIPv4 wrote:
| Hitting 500s when trying to push branches and create PRs.
| inaros wrote:
| Every day more Microsofty...they should rename to "Your
| Repository Needs To Restart To Apply Updates"
| amarant wrote:
| Lol, someone should make a pre -commit hook that reboots your
| computer with a message like this!
| corvad wrote:
| Just wait until github comes up with an outage tuesday.
| bartread wrote:
| "It looks like you're trying to develop some software.
|
| Would you like help?
|
| - Get help with developing the software
|
| - Just develop the software without help
|
| [ ] Don't show me this tip again"
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's now safe to turn off your expectations.
| kenhwang wrote:
| I wonder what the average career tenure of the userbase here is
| now, because Github was slow and flaky well before Microsoft
| got involved.
|
| Maybe it wasn't as noticeable when Github had less features,
| but our CI runners and other automation using the API a decade
| ago always had weekly issues caused by Github being
| down/degraded.
| morkalork wrote:
| Would you like to setups repository backups with OneDrive?
| rvz wrote:
| GitHub goes down at least once a week as I said before. [0]
| thanks to Copilot, Tay.ai and Zoe chatbots wrecking the platform
| instead of humans maintaining it.
|
| If there was a prediction market for when GitHub experiences an
| outage every week, then you would make a lot of money.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487881
| serf wrote:
| >GitHub goes down at least once a week as I said before. [0]
| thanks to Copilot, Tay.ai and Zoe chatbots wrecking the
| platform instead of humans.
|
| there are tens of thousands of stupid scripts hosted on github
| itself that have scheduled progmatic pushes or pulls to repos
| via cron jobs with millions and millions of users -- yeah LLMs
| accelerate the fire but let's not pretend that GH was some
| bastion of real-user-dom somehow at some point.
| pak9rabid wrote:
| Vegas should start taking bets
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| You have GOT to be kidding me.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No, got to be kidding me day is next week.
| ahstilde wrote:
| github is at one nine, basically:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47428035
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 9% ? /s (though To be honest I genuinely wouldn't be surprised
| if things go down so bad too at this point either)
| abound wrote:
| Unironically, I think 9% uptime would be "one-tenth of a
| nine".
| brookst wrote:
| Are you saying 9.999% isn't four nines?
| munchler wrote:
| Can't tell if this is intended as humor, but I LOL'ed.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| It unarguably is.
| mememememememo wrote:
| 90% would be one 9 following the sequence back.
|
| 99.99
|
| 99.90
|
| 99.00
|
| 90.00
| msandford wrote:
| I once worked at a place with more micro services than
| engineers. We joked about "we have as many 8s of uptime as you
| need!"
| the_real_cher wrote:
| seven nines? That's nothing , bro we got twelve eights!
| 0x3f wrote:
| > I once worked at a place with more micro services than
| engineers.
|
| Currently consulting somwhere with 30 services per engineer.
| I cannot convince them this is hell. Maybe that makes it my
| personal hell.
| msandford wrote:
| Oooof that's rough.
|
| One strategy to convince is to get someone less technical
| than you to sit by you while you try and trace everything
| from one error'd HTTP request from start to finish to
| diagnose the problem. If they see it takes half a day to
| check every call to every internal endpoint to 100% satisfy
| a particular request sometimes that can help.
|
| Also sometimes they just think "this is a bunch of nerd
| stuff, why are you involving me?!" So it's not foolproof.
| 0x3f wrote:
| Oh, my non-technical boss agrees with me already. It's
| actually the engineers who've convinced themselves it's a
| good setup. Nice guys but very unwilling to change. Seems
| they're quite happy to have become 'experts' in this mess
| over the last 5-10 years. Almost like they're in
| retirement mode.
|
| The real solution is probably to leave, but the market
| sucks at the moment. At least AI makes the 10-repos-per-
| tiny-feature thing easier.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| "Its like family here!"
|
| In that every night you're playing murder mystery, and its
| never fun.
| anotherjesse wrote:
| We pride ourself on 9 5s!
| rdtsc wrote:
| From five nines to nine fives
| corvad wrote:
| And this is why I self host a lot of my Git stack with Gerrit...
| mememememememo wrote:
| Or just make sure you git fetch repos into $other-place.
|
| That helps with Git not so much issues etc.
| corvad wrote:
| Yeah, I think especially Git mirrors can go a long too for
| maintaining availability and also for reducing load off main
| infra.
| steeleduncan wrote:
| What has changed at GitHub to cause this?
| voidfunc wrote:
| Azure
| altairprime wrote:
| > _Azure_
|
| To explain this one-word comment for those unfamiliar, see
| previously:
|
| _GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature
| development_ (5 months ago)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173
|
| In particular:
|
| > _GitHub has recently seen more outages, in part because its
| central data center in Virginia is indeed resource-
| constrained and running into scaling issues. AI agents are
| part of the problem here. But it's our understanding that
| some GitHub employees are concerned about this migration
| because GitHub's MySQL clusters, which form the backbone of
| the service and run on bare metal servers, won't easily make
| the move to Azure and lead to even more outages going
| forward._
| smartmic wrote:
| AIpocalypse. Eaten too much Copilot dog food.
| bartread wrote:
| Perhaps even AIslopalypse.
| zahlman wrote:
| I've been using "slopocalypse". People already know AI is
| responsible, but slop existed before -- e.g. conventionally
| generated SEO spam. It's just... so much worse now.
| bartread wrote:
| "Slopocalypse": yeah, I like that. Easier to pronounce
| too.
|
| At any rate, it seems like GitHub is back up now, so
| we'll see how long that lasts.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Looking at the status, its not one long outage, but lots of
| little ones, microslops if you will.
| adzm wrote:
| Weird Al needs to capitalize on this whole AI/Al thing
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Vibe coding features.
| qudat wrote:
| Their primary goal in the last year was to move to Azure. Any
| massive infra migration is going to cause issues.
| seneca wrote:
| > Any massive infra migration is going to cause issues.
|
| What? No, no it's not. The entire discipline of
| Infrastructure and Systems engineering are dedicated to doing
| these sorts of things. There are well-worn paths to making
| stable changes. I've done a dozen massive infrastructure
| migrations, some at companies bigger than Github, and I've
| never once come close to this sort of instability.
|
| This is a _botched_ infrastructure migration, onto a frankly
| inferior platform, not something that just happens to
| everyone.
| pixelesque wrote:
| Possibly a combination of moving infrastructure to Azure, and
| also a significant increase in the number of PRs and commits
| due to Vibe-coding?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Perhaps staff cuts having longtails?
| https://www.itpro.com/software/microsoft/microsoft-
| layoffs-h...
| paxys wrote:
| Senior engineers/leaders getting tired of Microsoft's shit and
| leaving.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I assume this is all of the pains of going from "GHA is sorta
| kinda on Azure", which was a bad state, to "GHA is going full
| Azure", which is a painful state to get to but presumably
| simplifies things.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| You never go full Azure
| the_real_cher wrote:
| A.I. but that acronym can mean a number of things.
|
| Artificial intelligence, Azure integration, many other things.
| pera wrote:
| _Microsoft Makes AI Mandatory For Employees_
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2025/07/08/microsof...
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I'm going to blame Claude Code!
| olivia-banks wrote:
| At least it happened after I did my work for the day... jfc!
| packetlost wrote:
| I've been sitting here waiting for a critical deploy to happen
| via GitHub Actions (I know, hour fault, we should have left ages
| ago). My patience for this bullshit is gone, I'm going to be
| pushing very hard to get us off of GitHub entirely except for
| public code mirrors going forward.
|
| Edit: oh look, their site says all good, but I still have jobs
| stuck. What a pile of garbage.
|
| I'm so sick of this.
| mememememememo wrote:
| Down? No sir we are not down. There are elevated error rates and
| degraded performance.
| karim79 wrote:
| The update to .NET framework went badly and we need to
| reinstall Windows.
| xtracto wrote:
| An isolated group of customers are experiencing elevated error
| rates and degraded performance.
|
| FTFY. (I've read AWS word it like that)
| mememememememo wrote:
| Technucally a set is a subset of itself.
| odiroot wrote:
| They invented the perfect solution to stop supply chain attacks.
| anematode wrote:
| Credential stealers hate this one trick!
| bartread wrote:
| Fuck sake. Again?
|
| Sorry, I realise this comment isn't up to HN's usual standards
| for thoughtfulness and it is perhaps a _bit_ inflammatory but...
| look, I 'd bet the majority of us on this site rely on GitHub and
| I can't be the only one becoming incredibly frustrated with its
| recent unreliability[0]?
|
| (And, yes, I did enough basic data analysis to confirm that it
| _IS_ indeed getting worse versus a year, two years, and three
| years ago, and is particularly bad since the start of this year.)
|
| _[0] EDIT: clearly not from looking at the rest of the comments
| in this discussion._
| zahlman wrote:
| > I realise this comment isn't up to HN's usual standards for
| thoughtfulness
|
| > And, yes, I did enough basic data analysis to confirm
|
| Perhaps you'd consider _showing us_ that analysis? That sounds
| like it would make a pretty substantive, thoughtful comment.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > consider showing us
|
| Gaze upon the tapestry in which github paints it's failure
| with a thin copper red thread:
|
| https://www.githubstatus.com/
| bartread wrote:
| @KaiserPro has pasted the link to someone else's heatmap,
| which is really good. Mine was just an Excel spreadsheet with
| a graph that I'd intended to write a blog about but then got
| demotivated on because I was too busy with other things and I
| saw that heatmap as well. Maybe I _will_ do a proper write up
| next time GitHub has an outage and I 'm blocked by it.
| dsm4ck wrote:
| Microslop at it again
| workfromspace wrote:
| Please don't use that term; it makes them look bad :p /s
| kraemahz wrote:
| Oh, they've gone beyond micro. It's Macroslop now!
| nasretdinov wrote:
| Must be Tuesday then
| sc__ wrote:
| Microslop
| hirako2000 wrote:
| I'm glad I moved over to forgejo. Being selfhosted, the UI loads
| faster. Most importantly, the thing is always responsive.
| mfenniak wrote:
| As a developer working on Forgejo -- glad you like it!
| hirako2000 wrote:
| It hosts all the repositories backing applycreatures, we ran
| dozens of git projects on the same instance, have teams, you
| guys did a phenomenal work. I would say it's even easy to
| customise.
|
| https://foja.applycreatures.com
|
| Edit: it has a wonderful API so I posted the link it may
| tempt some to ditch MS/Azure hub.
| paxys wrote:
| Took a full 8 years for a Microsoft acquisition to go to shit,
| which is probably a record. Kudos to the Github team for holding
| out this long.
| xeonmc wrote:
| How fast was Skype?
| cm2187 wrote:
| MSFT acquired Skype in 2011, so I would say only a few
| months:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s.
| ..
| htrp wrote:
| To be fair a bunch of this is because the CEO after Nat
| Friedman (Thomas Dohmke) was pushed out in August 25.
| workfromspace wrote:
| Who was also the last CEO, right? Is this a coincidence?
| carlosft wrote:
| And a ton of the top end ruby staff have left. Many of them
| ended up at shopify. There is a growing about of non
| ruby/rails code at github, but most of the system that people
| think of when they think github are ruby/rails.
| merlindru wrote:
| GitHub has always been incredibly outage riddled no? This is
| not a MSFT thing
| nine_k wrote:
| I don't remember that happening so much (if ever) in, say,
| 2016. But the frequency of noticeable incidents seemingly has
| been rising steadily since around 2023. The Azure migration
| apparently only exacerbated it.
| gbear605 wrote:
| Circa 2019, my office had a bell that we would ring
| whenever GitHub had an outage, and it was rung several
| times per week.
| georgel wrote:
| I remember it going down semi-regularly in the 2013+ era,
| and seeing HN posts about it. Especially if you were using
| a package manager reliant on GitHub like Cocoapods. It
| seems to me it is more "impactful" on the dev community now
| that they have gone past just being a centralized Git
| server for the team, to being the thing that does deploys
| and all sorts of other things.
| AndroTux wrote:
| I'm still baffled that Minecraft is doing so well, despite the
| whole Bedrock thing. At this point I think Microsoft just
| forgot that they bought Mojang.
| 7777332215 wrote:
| Minecraft is a trick up their sleeve yet to be used.
| Manipulate and indoctrinate the youth.
| Biganon wrote:
| Indoctrinated by cubic cows
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its had its fair share of outages and outrageous changes that
| overreach the bounds as well. Its more stable than github is
| but its had at least 2 sessions of downtime this year that I
| recall and they were both quite long (day length).
| spauldo wrote:
| They'd lose a whole lot of users if they killed Java edition,
| since the modded community is so large. They'd quickly find
| one of the Minecraft clones reaching feature parity. And
| there's no good reason for it - it's not like Java is a
| threat anymore.
| AndroTux wrote:
| Exactly. So why isn't Microsoft doing just that? Isn't that
| how Microsoft usually handles things? Just look at Xbox.
| They essentially screwed up everything they could and then
| some.
| cedws wrote:
| If I remember correctly UK players can no longer chat at all
| until they verify their ID.
| guywithabike wrote:
| The worst part of all this is that GitHub's CTO and VP of
| Engineering sent out the usual "here's what we'll do to fix
| things" letter to their larger customers and, without
| exaggeration, it boiled down to: 1) "Here's a bunch of stuff we
| already did!" which... clearly isn't working, and 2) "We're
| continuing our Azure migration." also clearly not working.
|
| So needless to say, if you depend on GitHub for critical business
| operations, you need to start thinking about what a world without
| GitHub looks like for your business and start working your way
| toward that. I know my confidence in GitHub's engineering
| leadership is at rock bottom.
| packetlost wrote:
| I second this. I'm done.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| I could sorta see a situation where the reality is "we're in
| the middle of a miserable transition and it'll clean up when
| we're done" but I don't think anyone has confidence that's all
| it is at this point.
| everforward wrote:
| Even that doesn't really make sense to me, unless they've
| done it in a way where everything has to move at once.
|
| Everywhere I've worked, if a migration is causing this much
| downtime then you kill the migration or slow it down. If
| every change has a 10% chance of bringing the site down, you
| only do a change every week or two until you can work out the
| kinks.
| acedTrex wrote:
| I mean, they are seemingly breaking every week or two so
| that might be what they are doing.
| shrikant wrote:
| ...or you keep fighting forward with the migration, because
| if it's seen as a failure then some pretty big heads will
| have to roll...
| suriya-ganesh wrote:
| also it should be noted that LinkedIn had a 5 year plan of
| migrating everything to azure but abandoned it after a year.
| sysworld wrote:
| ooooh, they're migrating to Azure, now everything makes sense.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| they're not just migrating to Azure, they're vibrating to
| Azure!
| spondyl wrote:
| Here are some relevant excerpts from an October 2025
| article[1]:
|
| > In a message to GitHub's staff, CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes
| that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data
| center. "It's existential for us to keep up with the demands
| of AI and Copilot, which are changing how people use GitHub,"
| he writes.
|
| > The plan, he writes, is for GitHub to completely move out
| of its own data centers in 24 months. "This means we have 18
| months to execute (with a 6 month buffer)," Fedorov's memo
| says. He acknowledges that since any migration of this scope
| will have to run in parallel on both the new and old
| infrastructure for at least six months, the team
| realistically needs to get this work done in the next 12
| months.
|
| If you consider that six month parallel window to have
| started from the time of the October memo (written presumably
| at the start of October), then that puts us currently or past
| the point where they would have cut off their old DC and
| defaulted to Azure only.
|
| Whether plans or timelines changed, I have no idea of course
| but the above does make for a convenient timeline that would
| explain the recent instability. Of course, it could also just
| be symptomatic of increased AI usage generally and the same
| problems might have surfaced at a software level regardless
| of whether they were in a DC or on Azure.
|
| Putting that nuance aside, personally I like the idea that
| Azure is simply a giant pile of shit operated by a
| corporation with no taste.
|
| [1]: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-
| to-a...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >It's existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI
| and Copilot
|
| if by chance the CTO reads this, as a user of GitHub I
| would find it really existential if GitHub continues
| functioning as a reliable _hub for git workflows_ (hence
| the name), and I have the strong suspicion nobody except
| for the shareholders gives a lick about copilot or 'AI' if
| it makes the core service the site was designed for
| unusable
| jwoq9118 wrote:
| For GitHub to remain profitable they have to appease
| those shareholders you mentioned.
| kleene_op wrote:
| Azure, the color of BSOD
| pm90 wrote:
| i heard that they asked LinkedIn to do this too and they
| either refused or their systems were too complex so they
| refused to. Maybe that explains why LI availability seems ok
| comice wrote:
| yeah currently working with Azure. what a PITA.
|
| I wonder if the extended downtime is just due to the on-call
| engineers waiting for their azure auth tokens to refresh
| within azure's own damn network.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Is "migrating to Azure" the new "migrating to SAP?"
| trvz wrote:
| That's not for to ... SAP.
| rileymichael wrote:
| looking forward to the `addressing-githubs-recent-availability-
| issues-3` news post
| esafak wrote:
| Microsoft products are so human, they stop working weekly as if
| they're observing some sort of sabbath ...
| duped wrote:
| Does github not do any kind of blue/green rollouts or what
| pbkompasz wrote:
| Vibe check?
| pylua wrote:
| Anyone else notice other Microsoft cloud services ( for instance
| inside azure ) with bad performance also?
|
| I can't be specific but we are constantly complaining.
| keithnz wrote:
| No? Azures been rock solid for us.
| pylua wrote:
| Front door did have a major outage last year.
| sysworld wrote:
| The Azure management UI, yes, so slowww. But the services (VMs
| etc) have been good.
| overgard wrote:
| I remember back in the early Windows XP era when things got so
| bad that Microsoft basically had to make a hard pivot towards
| security and reliability.
|
| I think they may need to do that once again. Almost every product
| of theirs feels like a dumpster fire. GitHub is down constantly,
| Windows 11 is a nightmare and instead of patching things they're
| adding stupid features nobody asked for. I think they need to
| stop and really look closely at what they're prioritizing.
| ekropotin wrote:
| Remember when GitHub was cool? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I remember. My GitHub user ID is #5907, account created
| 2008-04-08T20:27:36Z. I think it is inevitable that all good
| things come to an end, but it's still a bummer to see.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| As do I. Mine is even earlier as well!
| rdedev wrote:
| My vscode slop session stopped in between. Maybe it's for the
| better
| jeppester wrote:
| At this rate it will be a matter of time before a "Github is up"
| parody site reaches the top of HN
| proc0 wrote:
| It's starting to really look like the AI effect. It might be
| coincidence but I've noticed a lot more downtime and bad software
| lately. The last Nvidia drivers gave me a blue screen (last week
| or so), and speaking about Windows, I froze updates last year
| because it was clear they were introducing a bunch of issues with
| every update (not to mention unwanted features).
|
| I like AI but actually not for coding because code quality is
| correlated to how well you understand the underlying systems
| you're building on, and AI is not really reasoning on this level
| at all. It's clearly synthesizing training data and it's useful
| in limited ways.
| newbish wrote:
| I think maybe it's not that GitHub is using AI, but that the
| amount of AI slop going into GitHub may be more than they
| expected.
| qbane wrote:
| Productivity is finite. If you pivot entirely to the AI
| stack, you're going to lose bandwidth for everything else.
| It's an opportunity cost problem.
| someperson wrote:
| GitHub has been unreliable since before AI. Though it's
| definitely gotten far worse.
|
| Seemingly the decline started with the Microsoft acquisition in
| 2018, and subsequent "unlimited private repository" change in
| 2019 (to match Gitlab's popular offer)
| hparadiz wrote:
| One example is the search being broken for CI logs. It takes
| over your browser's search hotkey too. What happens is every
| stage of the log is collapsed so the search doesn't work
| until you trigger the expansion but if you attempt to search
| before expanding the search will never work after it's been
| initialized. It's pretty infuriating when you're trying to
| find something in a giant build log.
| stevepotter wrote:
| I'm just going to stand by until Microsoft is back in everyone's
| good graces again by releasing some oss software that we all
| swoon over
| kace91 wrote:
| Is that a cyclical thing? I went through the VS code+typescript
| good graces era but I didn't know there were previous cycles.
| RevEng wrote:
| Not that I remember. VS Code was a surprising turnabout for a
| company that was both adamantly closed and threw FUD around
| like monkeys in a zoo.
| philipallstar wrote:
| You've been here before!
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Did MS finish the Hotmail transition?
| wenbin wrote:
| I guess vibe coding can't solve such problem for now...
| s_u_d_o wrote:
| Can this downtime be quantified to actual monetary losses?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| That's just like your Vibe man; can you just copilot your wayout
| of these problems?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Man, a while ago I thought: "It happens often, alright, but every
| 2 weeks? Sounds like a slight exaggeration." But it really is
| every 2 weeks, isn't it? If I imagine in a previous job anything
| production being down every 2 weeks ... phew, would have had to
| have a few hard talks and course corrections.
| genewitch wrote:
| i once fixed a site going down several times a year with two
| t1.micro instances in the same region as the majority of
| traffic. Instantly solved the problem for what, $20/month?
|
| Another site was constantly getting DDoS by Russians who were
| made we took down their scams on forums, that had to go through
| verisign back then, not sure who they're using now. They may
| have enough aggregate pipe it doesn't matter at this point
| newbish wrote:
| So am I the only one thinking that maybe GitHub is succumbing to
| the weight of AI slop that's coming in from all the vibecoding,
| clawbots, and other AI workflows?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Do your part; remind people that Github is not git. Git is
| decentralizable and people should know this.
| TimReynolds wrote:
| Would be easier for them to just tell us when it's up these days
| tholford wrote:
| Setting up a Gitea instance is approachable, especially with
| agent assistance.
|
| https://about.gitea.com/
| messe wrote:
| For fucks sake.
|
| I've been considering it for a while, but I'm definitely now
| pitching a move away from GitHub at our organization.
| jbmilgrom wrote:
| h8 github so much. ahhhhhh
| justinholmes wrote:
| Moved to self hosted crowci instead of actions.
| lousken wrote:
| Github CEO must be on HN, right? If so, any comments?
|
| They have not even bothered to implement entra login when they
| have their competitors login for years, do they even know what
| their product is? Or are you just a middle man for slop?
| mayhemducks wrote:
| Does anyone else ever think "that code I just pushed into my repo
| just took down all of github..." whenever it goes down around the
| same time you sync your changes?
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| That Go rewrite continues to rear its head, eh?
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Just moved a project of mine to Gitlab. Created this very simple
| component with codex that will keep a mirror updated on GitHub
| for me, so I can focus development on Gitlab.
|
| https://gitlab.com/gabriel.chamon/ci-components/-/tree/main/...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| [delayed]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-24 23:00 UTC)