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Comment by thsowers | Hacker News Reader

If you view the historical uptime, it does seem like there have been more incidents in the past three months, but otherwise the waters look calm (as reported at least): https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=1

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Yes, and so this is actually a thing that bugs me, because I use Github every day. Over the past several months, there have been numerous days in which I've had problems (`You can not comment at this time`, 500s, etc.) and no corresponding status report.

It seems like the historical uptime page paints a far rosier picture than I am actually experiencing.

I wonder how companies like github decide to determine this when outages are geospecific. Do they not report until an outage is affecting 50% of a geographic region before its reported as a partial outage?

It's almost as if keeping a complex service like Github online and available to millions of users is hard.

Building skyscrapers is hard. Does that make it OK for them to fall down regularly?

GitHub hasn't collapsed killing thousands or needing to be completely rebuilt though, so that analogy doesn't work. This is more like there's a flood in the lobby so maintenance has closed the front door for a bit.

Planes sometimes crash without killing people or needing to be completely rebuilt; that doesn't mean that this is clearly undesirable.

It's not a good thing that Github is down. It's an inevitable thing that comes from complexity at scale though. Hard things are hard, whether that's planes, buildings, or web apps.

I didn't mean for the point to be about the consequences of the failure. What I was trying to argue against was the notion that it's fine for things to fail, just by virtue of them being hard. There are a lot of complicated systems in the world that work extremely reliably.

If you do nothing, it lands by default on the "git operations" view, which is by far the most stable, since, well, it consists of executing the battle-tested git program.

If you want to see more the state of github "extras", you'd need to select "github actions" or "webhooks", which have a fair amount of downtime (about once a week or so, which seems about right).

Interesting how the most stable component of the company is the open source one of course ^^

I wonder if it has something to do with the past 3 months have been coronavirus related, higher internet usage?

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