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Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

This is not to say that things haven't gotten worse over time, but...

I don't think that chart shows what it seems like it shows. There were plenty of pre-2018 outages that don't show up there: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&...

An alternate interpretation of that chart is "After the microsoft acquisition, they got serious about actually tracking outages."

That said, anecdotally, it's felt much worse over the last 6 months. I'd guess it's a combination of MS-induced quality drops and AI-induced scale increases.

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Well, perhaps not as long ago (e. g. from the acquisition), but if you look at the last four weeks or so, just that part alone, you can clearly see that something is not working here. Microsoft is constantly mentioned on Hacker News and not typically in a great, praising light.

If it’s just the last 4 weeks, then I would say it seems the Microsoft acquisition had little impact on their reliability.

It seems pretty reasonable that the massive surge in AI over the past 6 months has put tremendous strain on GitHub’s infrastructure, and most of these outages are as a result of that one way or another.

They're moving to Azure and had to fix up Azure first to be stable enough for GH to even consider moving.

I'm guessing its a combo of Azure still not being stable enough and a byproduct of trying to move an entire company's operations from a physical DC into a cloud while its running.

Speculation from afar: clouds are not commensurate, and high-volume cloud services are going to anchor key architectural decisions around technical benefits/realities of the cloud environment they target. Moving GitHub isn’t a tech decision, and it’s broadly a Dumb Idea.

I think GitHub is well past the complexity threshold where the reflective architecting that happens during cloud development can’t be separated from product. If the Engineers were begging for Azure it’d be one thing, but otherwise this is destabilizing churn.

I agree Azure needed a lift to even handle the job, and see the that gap as indicative of a more fundamental challenge. That change is kinda like a skeleton transplant… managements feelings and post-surgery desires don’t necessarily account for the impact and essential difficulty.

Yeah idk why they're so intent on doing this migration it seems silly and wasteful and bad for their image.

I think it is probably a combination of:

- Switching to Azure

- Adding more AI features

- Using AI more for development

- Higher load caused by AI agents

Three of those are top-down direction from MS.

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