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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

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sebmellen

This is at least a multi-million dollar payout (if they admit to it).

All GitHub Pages say

> We're having a really bad day.

> The Unicorns have taken over. We're doing our best to get them under control and get GitHub back up and running.

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At the moment, all github services seem to be restored, and the github status indicates that the problem is still ongoing. I don't think it's related to the SLA, but rather to the monitoring, which is not live. There are a few minutes of delay.

Seems slightly unproffesional for a massive company like Github/Microsoft.

I disagree. This hurts no one, and not everything needs to be sanitized and painted over with bland corporatespeak.

I don't think they were asking for corporate speak. But at least I would find a plain technical error message like "cannot contact file server" much more respectable than something like "unicorns are hugging our servers uwu".

This “ironic” and “humorous” style of errors and UI captions is the actual new corporate speak. I’d prefer dumb error messages rather than some shit someone over the ocean thinks is smart and humorous. And it’s not funny at all when it’s a global outage impacting my business and my $$$.

It's closer to the truth than you usually get. They're having a bad day, it's completely true. It's the start of my day, but I guess this is the middle of the night for them. There's no such thing as unicorns, but that just highlights the metaphorical nature of the remaining claim - getting Unicorns under control means solving their problems. Normally "professional" corporate speak means avoiding saying anything whose meaning is plain on its face and disconfirmable while avoiding the implication that the company is run and operated by humans. This is a model. (Obviously the came up with the message in advance, which just goes to show that someone in the company is well enough rounded to know that if it is displayed, they're having a bad day.)

GitHub is (was?) a Rails application, so it was probably originally running behind Unicorn [0], if it isn’t still. So the unicorns are (were) real.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(web_server)

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