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Comment by montroser | Hacker News Reader

It has been pretty rough. Their own numbers report just a single `9` for Actions in Feb 2026 with 98% uptime. But that said -- I don't get the 90% number.

Anecdotally, it seems believable that 1 in 50 times (2%) in Feb that Actions barfed. Which is not very nice, but it wasn't at 1 in 10 times (10%).

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It looks like the aggregate stats are more of a venn diagram than an average. So if 1/N services are down, the aggregate is considered down. I don't think this is an accurate way to calculate this. It should be weighted or in some way show partial outages. This belief is derived from the Google SRE book, in particular chapters 3 (embracing risk) and 4 (service level objectives)

https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/

https://sre.google/sre-book/service-level-objectives/

I mean I think it's useful. It answers the question, "what percentage of the time can I rely on every part of GitHub to work correctly?". The answer seems to be roughly 90% of the time.

Nobody cares about every part of GitHub working correctly. I mean, ok, their SREs are supposed to, but tabling the question of whether that's true: if tomorrow they announced a distributed no-op service with 100% downtime, you should not have the intuition that the overall availability of the platform is now worse.

I don't use half of the services, the answer is not straight forward

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

If you're using all services, then any partial outage is essentially a full outage. Of course, you can massage the numbers to make it look nicer in the way you described but the conservative approach is better for the customers. If you insist, one could create this metric for selected services only to "better reflect users".

That being said, even when looking at the split uptimes, you'd have to do a very skewed weighting to achieve a number with more than one 9.

> That being said, even when looking at the split uptimes, you'd have to do a very skewed weighting to achieve a number with more than one 9.

It's definitely bad no matter how it you slice the pie.

If GH pages is not serving content, my work is not blocked. (I don't use GH pages for anything personally)

That's how you count uptime. You system is not up if it keeps failing when the user does some thing.

The problem here is the specification of what the system is. It's a bit unfair to call GH a single service, but it's how Microsoft sells it.

> That's how you count uptime.

It's not how I and many others calculate uptime. There is not uniformity, especially when you look at contracts.

As a “customer”, I consider github down if I can’t push, but not down if I can’t update my profile photo (literally did this today, sending out my github to potential employers for the first time in a long time). This stuff is notoriously hard to define

In a nutshell, why would the consumer care (for the SLO) care about how the vendor sliced the solution into microservices?

It will depend on the contract.

When I was at IBM, they didn't meet their SLOs for Watson and customers got a refund for that portion of their spend

Thinking back to when I was hosting, I think telling a customer "your web server was running fine it's just that the database was down" would not have been received well.

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