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Comment by smilesmile2018 | Hacker News Reader

smilesmile2018·

GitHub team seems to be VERY unprofessional. 15 hour outage means ~99.82% availability which is extremely bad. 9 hours ago they also told that they would fix the problem within 2 hours... still not fixed!!!

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In order to objectively assess their level of professionalism, you'd need to know what happened, and what's going on in there right now. Think about it this way - can someone break things where you work right now to cause an outage of this magnitude? For all places that I've worked the answer would be "yes, of course".

It doesn't matter, really. Its a black box from a business perspective. Some users have lost faith, and some people will migrate to other solutions. Regardless of how fair or unfair the incident was, it is a fact that it was poor up-time especially for such an important cloud provider for code.

Making decisions based on a single event is risky. One could even argue that an event of this magnitude is likely to cause significant improvements in reliability. And you just paid the price for that as a user, so unless they keep failing repeatedly, you may be better off sticking with them.

> One could even argue that an event of this magnitude is likely to cause significant improvements in reliability.

Doesn't happen in practice and usually the whole thing is just blamed on "process" with subsequent "process changes".

You need to judge them by the recovery in the context of what happened. GitHub has a world class engineering team, but major outages still happen. Even in the context of a major outage, they have best-in-class status pages and frequent around-the-clock updates.

I helped manage a hosted DVCS and CI system in my previous job, and do you know what we would've called an outage that happened at 7:00PM and had recovered partially before start of business?

A Tuesday.

Wait for the RCA to come out before throwing any stones.

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