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Comment by altern8 | Hacker News Reader

Why do they go down so often? Is it true that the reason is that they've incorporated too much AI without human review?

It's (a) they're under massively increased load because everyone's vibing up new projects these days, (b) they've been in a weird frankenstein "on azure but also we have our own control plane" state for years and they're pushing to no longer have that be the case.

I don't think vibecoding at Github has much to do with it.

I started using an agent (Codex) on my repo and it went from a a few dozen clones to thousands (3383 this week). I dunno what the agents are doing to clone the repo so many times -- I'm not running 3000 agents or prompts, maybe 10 or so this week. But if this is typical, a 1000x increase in usage across the board can't be good on the system.

> I dunno what the agents are doing to clone the repo so many times

agentic "ai" is going great

Ah, yes. A lot more repos, commits, and most importantly huge PRs.

That makes sense. Thank you!

No, it doesn’t. Their competition is not similarly unstable, despite existing in the same world of LLMs. Think critically.

Devil’s advocate, Pareto heuristic would let us speculate that 80% of LLM traffic would be aimed directly at the largest provider, i.e. GitHub.

I think it’s much more than 80%, it’s probably the default recommendation and folks who aren’t technical would just accept it. Probably closer to 95% or more

Your speculation is that their competitors would naturally not see a commensurate increase in instability while “only” handling 20% of the same crisis?

I don’t buy the excuse. I want to hitch my wagon to those “mysteriously lucky” competitors. (And have. And haven’t had similar issues to Github, since.)

Competitors would be long tail, so a different mode of traffic entirely. Maybe they get spikes that are more easily whack-a-moled than the constant hammering that GitHub receives.

Tough to say as this is all speculative, though.

It's probably a threshold thing isn't it? You wouldn't get 20% of the effect at 20% of the traffic. There's a step function in there somewhere.

Isn't the relative increase more of interest? If someone was only owning 10% of the market, and they've only gotten 8% (percentage points) of the 20%-not-GH LLM-related increase, they'd still be seeing a very similar spike compared to their baseline as GitHub.

Their competition doesn't have nearly the same scale of traffic because they don't have nearly the same scale of users or network effects.

Think critically.

Microsoft has boasted 30% of their code written by AI.[1] However we could only guess if AI generated code is the issue or something else, or a combination of things.

That being said there was a noticeable trend starting around 2022.[2] That being said they’ve also been doing a big migration to Azure. It’s likely a combination of things.

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/LOMPaSv3wY

The instability started well before vibecoding, in around 2018-2019, shortly after the Microsoft acquisition.

https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591928

This gets posted every time GitHub is down. This chart is not accurate. It is based on data scraped from GitHub's status page and that data is missing historical incidents from the pre-Microsoft era.

Yeah, it’s not even consistent with their own incident history. I spot checked it and consistently found incidents with downtime/elevated error rates in months listed as 100.00000% uptime on that chart.

The unofficial and offical charts are both lying. The GitHub one ignores actual outages and the unofficial ones count minor display bugs in minor features as a “github outage”.

The unofficial one has done that for years though so it’s useful for comparison. If you go back a few years it was regularly at 99.9% uptime.

Just vibes wise, before Microsoft acquired GitHub, they added almost no features on a regular basis. These days they are adding tons of stuff every month.

When I dug in to the latest outages, they were almost all in small newer, features like all the AI stuff. The actual core GitHub platform seems much more stable than the unofficial uptime trackers propose.

I’m not sure about how stable it seems. I’ve been running into to slow or not working at all GitHub issues constantly over the last few months.

There’s also this blurb from a story on HN the other day that supports what I’m seeing.

“ I've felt this way for a long time, but for the past month I've kept a journal where I put an "X" next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage3. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.”

GitHub had a blog post about this recently. They reported a significant uptick in volume (repos created, PRs, etc.), which they attribute to AI usage and tooling.

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

Do you really believe their competition hasn’t seen the same increase? Because their competition certainly hasn’t seen the same instability issues.

Yes, I truly believe that GitHub is recommended by an LLM orders of magnitude more frequently than any other forge

I’ve interviewed a lot of people and when asking about their git experience they’ve said they use GitHub. To a lot of devs they are the same thing.

This plus in a well-designed system an increase in load might cause new jobs to stop running but shouldn't take down the whole system.

What competition?

I personally trigger github actions approximately 50x more than I did prior to AI-driven developer coding and I'm not alone.

Totally agree. There's days (or even afternoons) where I trigger more actions than I would have done in a month.

Okay so the recent outages are also likely due to increased load due to AI assisted development speeding up workflows.

It could be many things. Microsoft mismanaging stuff. Azure. Vibe-coded Github. So much AI slop being committed it adds an extra burden on the servers, etc.

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