githubstatus.com
Edit: at the time of posting there was not an incident on githubstatus.com. Now there is. https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/zkxwbgr0cnmx
Original Title: "Tell HN: GitHub Is Overloaded"
There's a lot of consumer surplus with the features GitHub offers. I'm sure they can have better pricing tiers to capture the surplus without losing too many users.
More realistically, MAU or something is a metric/OKR. It’s easy to imagine why a business wouldn’t want to cap that.
The audience will go away to somewhere you aren't. Then what?
There are people in this thread that have said their biggest reason for not moving away is the network effect.
No one needs github for git itself, nor even for web front-end to git, nor even for hosted/managed someone else's problem web front-end to git, nor even all of that for free.
AI makes investors/shareholders go brrr.
(maybe F500 people have their colocated box, but I have the impression that those are the "first class" seats (very expensive but _very few_) whereas enterprise cloud is the "business class" (loooooots of seats making a lot of money)
Depends, some of them use GH Enterprise but many (surprisingly) don't.
- Phase 1: Implode even harder than GitHub under the onslaught of LLM generated code
- Phase 2: ???
- Phase 3: Profit!
Nobody wants users they can't monetize and hosting LLM output for free isn't monetizable. It's not even valuable as training data.
If they make it harder to push slop on github, people might treat it as an incentive to generate less slop. Less tokens sold. Bad. Very bad.
The github paying customers are not going to move away.
Plus, it's probably genuinely hard to scale. And they can't throw compute at the problem - all compute is already going to the LLMs.
Last month, I made more commits than my entire 2025 combined.
But that discards my point, which is that you should probably have been prevented from pushing all those to github unless you were paying them for it, but you weren't because the executives running github can't admit that AI is bad for their platform.
How much more value did those commits create than in 2025?
So probably 10x more value is my guess for my entire team.
If you mean translating that into revenue, I'm not sure. Our product is better than ever with features a much bigger team couldn't dream of building before. Stability has also been better with fewer bugs, issues, downtime. When there are bugs, it gets fixed far quicker than before.
So more accurately, we placed developers who left the team with humans using more tokens.
Seems presumptuous to assume a root case while the incident is still ongoing, no?
They’ve been having issues for a while.
I would gladly pay that fee if it means Github is reliable for paying customers.
X doesn't even need to be that low. It could be 100 or 200. Just something that slows down the agents that spam them with commits/pushes.
The question is: are they willing to compromise growth for QoS. So far the answer is a resounding: "no". They are deliberately sacrificing the experience of existing users to gain new ones.
I think it behooves them for the public presentation of their issues to too much load. If they implemented load shedding and still had issues the follow-up questions would be less comfortable.
Looking at a unicorn page, I feel this lingering hope that it's transient (like it usually was in the old days) but my mind reassures me it's probably going to be a long full outage again.
The hope is dead.
But maybe I’m wrong?
Anyone here have data on whether the likes of gitlab have been impacted in the same was as github?
That being said, a Git forge for a small/mid-sized company is not something that requires rocket surgery. Forgejo with an SQLite database and a daily backup to S3 would be more than enough for the majority of users.
But I’m more lenient with codeberg because they are a non-profit and as you say, they are banning vibe-coded project because of the cost to infrastructure. In the meantime, GitHub is encouraging vibe-coding, multiplication of the source code, and genAI discussions.
The original source was Kyle Daigle, GH COO.
They need to start getting rid of the free tiers for GitHub Actions and actually charge appropriately or increase prices for it.
GitHub sells this as a service.
The app is also designed so when you open Insta, only a few images are shown, infinite scroll is there for a reason. The search page suggestions? Probably from a cache and then re-ranked quickly.
I used to manage a popular app/website that had tens of billions of real user page views per month. It wasn't easy but it also wasn't hard. It was surprisingly easy with a single large Postgres DB, a lot of caching, optimized tables and queries.
How many hires went into infra and platform? How many went to Gen AI org units?
From what I see, and that is a constant wave of very meh features, it seems like the latter.
At most normal companies you monitor your systems and address potential bottlenecks before they reach a tipping point. And generally you want enough headroom that a sudden 2-3x increase in demand wouldn't take out the service.
Either Github's technical leadership/talent is completely out of their depth (seems unlikely), or they're not hiring enough engineers to work on these capacity issues.
Regarding their leadership, I'd argue the latter implies the former.
So yeah I'd say they're out of their depth.
You mean people pushing LLM assisted coding, or github's own coders pushing LLM assisted code to production ? :-).
I am more inclined to think that it is the second, but if the reason is the first, what is particular hard to scale ? It's not like everybody is vide-coding into a single repository, so I would expect that most of the load would naturally be scalable by increasing the resources. If for some reason that is not possible, I would expect a corporation as big as Github to keep the paying customers working by gracefully denying service to the free tier, not to collapse like an house of cards.
Why not both?
Despite minimal new features, and drastically increasing hardware resources to keep up, self-hosted GitHub enterprise went from things being instant to most requests taking many seconds. And activity on issues in one repository tends to mysteriously re-open issues with the same number in other repositories.
I think they are vibe coding and facing the consequences.
Do you think they have such measures in place? I remember when my indention wasn't spotless our university rejected my commits or if my function complexity was too high.. Tears in my eyes.. I think it was called Gerrit Code Review.
No faith left. None. They turn everything into a quagmire.
The "AI is using a lot of resources" excuse was maybe acceptable last year but not in Q3 2026.
Managers and executives though? Those I do blame. Surely at this point it should be blindingly obvious their current strategy is not working.
Youtube and Insta and Facebook and many other social media platforms handle very resource intensive media for billions of people plus bots.
Increased influx from AI is not plausible when viewed from that lens.
Taking every developer in the world and multiplying by 12x-24x is not a-lot compared to many consumer oriented sites.
Second, you can’t ignore the payloads, even an AI mostly text push is nothing compared to, say, 10 iPhone pictures or one moderate video.
A 12x increase in volume should not be world ending for Microsoft given that the number of developers in the world is a pretty small baseline number to start from.
Commit volume went from 1 billion total in all of 2025 to 275 million per week by early 2026.
Microsoft has to spend more money on acquiring games studios for billions of dollars then shut them down.
I do know that very few systems are designed to handle a 14x increase in traffic painlessly (275M*52 = 14.3B), especially at scale.
It has really just coasted on GH's network effect because everybody uses GH for git by default. It doesn't really have much direct competition and anything that does offer something like GH just doesn't have the same mindshare.
In that way, GH became more like MS.
MSFT is giving away most of their Azure Datacenters resources to AI, to make money and doesn't care if Github suffers along the way and drains Github's available resources to bare minimum. Leading to outages like this, but you're 100% spot on right too. All those Claude/OpenClaw instances produce so much Code, people setup more and more repositories.
I guess they're quite happy with that TBF, it doesn't seem like they're that interested in being a git forge anyway.
Has big tech reached a similar status like banks in that they are "too big to fail" i.e. when they do fail we all just look the other way and say: "well everyone else is out too". Didn't someone recently calculate that GitHub is running at 95%? For comparison the Irish Rail service which is not reliable has 80% of it's trains run on time.
This seems absurd and really challenges a lot of ideas I had about big tech and cloud infrastructure. GitHub seems to have remained the dominant player relative to GitLab etc.
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.
It takes a while by hand, but I recently saw a migration of old Jenkins projects to Actions with AI (yea), and it was smooth.
(only 5% /s)
The earliest recorded downtime for Git Ops I could find is in December 2018. https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime/8l4ygp009s5s?page=32
I still remember that they launched GitHub Actions in 2018 and back then I was thinking: They can't even make the website reliable, surely this will only cause them more problems.
> Update 16:59 UTC - The degradation affecting API Requests, Actions, Git Operations, Issues, Pages, Pull Requests and Webhooks has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.
> Update 17:30 UTC - Git Operations is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
> Update 17:36 UTC - Issues is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
> Update 18:48 UTC - API Requests is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
I suppose people can use git too if they ever figure out how to send emails from a dedicated client.
Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.
In comparison to SVN and other non-DVCs git did not need to continuously talk to the central server for history, "branch" creations, unlocking/locking files before changes, etc.
Linus wanted a DVCS, but they wanted centralization and licenses were expensive, so he decided to launch the git initiative where he provided scaffolding and the rest came from contributions.
Back then, when working with SVN, we had sites in various countries, with under provisioned VPNs between them. Loading up a single file history could take 15 minutes. I am not joking. Every single operation took ages, so really, any DVCS would have won in that situation, regardless of its approach to branches.
If the SVN server would sit in the same building then I guess the branching would have been the main selling point, but it was not the main selling point for us in that situation.
No matter how beneficial the ability to work offline was, branching was still far more important. It's a completely different order of magnitude. Git without offline capabilities would still be a massive success. Git without branching would not.
I do think GitHub has positively contributed to the software industry and open source. It’s been enshittified for sure, but it has had a golden era.
If I build something that satisfies me and say 100 users (who all star me) does that really say anything. Are those 100 stars even "real" any more?
All the old problems of the web are new again, and still remain unsolved.
some investors use stars (and star growth velocity) to determine which projects they invest or don't invest in. (not saying it's good or bad - just saying it's a real thing.)
You can argue that the lack of diversity in infrastructure is bad, and I wouldn’t disagree. I think we should have more projects to explore better ways of working. But, the tradeoff is that when you have a centralized system, like GitHub, you also have less friction. The learning curve is small when everything uses the same tools.
There are many git hosting options, including some for self hosting. its a lot easier to switch to a different version control host than to a different version control system.
Ever since the Twitter -> X rebranding, every time I open Twitter links, I have a very high chance of hitting a "Something went wrong" type page, with a retry button that just does nothing. It's been like this for ages. I barely open Twitter links anymore as a result.
EVERY other client I've ever worked with used their own gitforge or at least bitbucket...
Hell, even I do it.
None (apart from one customer as I said) has their code on GitHub.
The big ones because of trade secrets. Which is ironic, because most of them use Microsoft Teams and talk freely there xD
Note that raw user numbers won't really cut it; if 1 million people left Twitter, it's possible that 500 000 of those people joined and 500 000 new people joined; the user numbers would look like everyone returned, but really only 50% did in this hypothetical.
Github is actually down and I can't push code right now, it's blocking my business which is unacceptable. It's a broken tool.
On Twitter, it's mostly the networking effect, you want to be where peoples are, and unless a large chunk move at once, you are stuck there.
On Github, it's the technical cost of migrating, the git part is trivial, but tickets, PR history and CI/Integration are another can of worms.
Projects which moved away, moved away for good, at most only leaving a synchronized mirror.
and this assertion is based on ... ?
Even if the platform itself doesn't take off, the protocol and the data ownwership (you host your repo artifacts, issues, prs, etc on your ATproto server) mean that a competitor could come in easily if you were no longer satisfied with performance, reliability, or monetization.
Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.
And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).
Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.
This isn't "psyops". Sure, it's a bad side of social interactions, but when you interact with other people, there's always some of this - in person as well as online.
The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".
I have no argument that selling popularity is bad and filtering by stars is stupid, but I don't blame Github for any of that.
You could equally well assign the success of certain coders to YouTube because they came to attention by showing off their work in livestreams. Which I do not. They found a way to advertise their own success, but it's theirs.
The argument is that there's no need for that much social interaction to produce quality code, quite the contrary, the more social interaction, the more focus is lost.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but there's a reason why the Linux Kernel communication is still done through acerbic email threads.
In my eyes it would be a ginormous gain to our colective mental health to not have the expectation to contribute to open source projects for free, or to have "green squares" every day on a public GitHub profile.
Great that it doesn't work on you, but it works really well on a depressingly large number of people.
https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...
Seems like it's far from production-ready and there hasn't been much activity this year?
This is the way. Stop centralizing everything.
This splintering should happen more often.
It's a social network with github-like social features and git hosting, but you can still self host your git and have all the features like issues, PRs and so on just like GitHub.
And it's built on ATProto so you can also have your issues PRs and so on hosted on your infra, but everything interconnects nicely with your single account, just like using GitHub.
They even added a vouching system for users, to know who to trust based on who you already trusted.
On the contrary, I believe it's been detrimental to the open internet and only serves to control us by the powerful.
I never trusted Github and never will.
Gathered details on embedding request syntax from
Unicorn! · GitHub
No idea if/when we decide to pull that bandaid but I think once we can't merge a hot fix into main because of GH being down, it'll be a big org push to replace it.
What's everyone else using? Self hosted Gitlab? Gitea?
Cost as always depends on your usage, but it will likely be less than your current cost of GitHub Actions.
Did you have the conversation "do we need to move from $whatever CI/CD to GitHub Actions?" beforehand? What were the arguments in favour?
- It was believed that GitHub would be more reliable than our self hosted Gitlab CI runners. This has proven to be very false.
- It was believed it would be easier to write tooling. I’m not on the dev tooling team, so can’t confirm if they found it true or not, but from the outside I see a lot more “Github can’t do that” than I did “Gitlab can’t do it”
Why is it hilarious to believe that the industry leader might be better at something than doing it yourself?
tangled.org!
Tangled.org really been working to ensure all their features work from data hosted on your personal data server (it's based on ATproto) which means should their performance, reliability, or monetization ever get you down it's easy to switch to a competitor since you're not locked in.
I mean, that plus better uptime.
See: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
Not if you want to make sure it compiles and works on Windows (which you don't have) or macOS (which you don't have and can't emulate). That's something github gives for free, and for me, it's the only reason to stay on github for small/tiny free software projects (at least as a secondary host).
they've had multiple outages in the last week, so i guess they are proving themselves correct.
in practice, giving ssh/sudo to AI (codex) and telling it to setup ephemeral self-hosted runners on your own host VM (qemu), takes about 30 minutes and works extremely well. it bangs out all the shell scripts. moved my own business over to it. zero problems.
you might even find it is kind of neat too. you can customize your VM with software pre-installed. speeds up your builds quite a bit.
[0] https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/blacksmith-seed-announcement
Frontier labs and global saas heavyweights run CI through us, plus a crop of open source tooling like Bazel, vLLM, Firecracker, Rails, Ray, Sorbet and Rust.
Shopify, Uber, Airbnb, Canva stresstested the platform ten years ago for scaling issues.
You need to take a little time to design upfront and take advantage of dynamically programmable primitives. It isn't the same ease/convenience as Actions. Bit more available though.
I think an in between tier would help, as it’s 4.5x the cost of GitHub per person, plus the cost of the runners. The idea of spending $42/mo on GitHub plus $180 on buuldkite is a hard sell, but the economics aren’t there.
steps:
name: Do the thing
run: nix build .#
Self hosted github enterprise and runners.
> Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 429 (Too Many Requests).
> Warning: Back off 19.714 seconds before retry.
> Warning: Failed to download action 'https://codeload.github.com/'.
> Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 502 (Bad Gateway).
> Warning: Back off 22.228 seconds before retry.
> Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 429 (Too Many Requests).
> Error: Failed to download archive 'https://codeload.github.com/' after 3 attempts.
Nice - even their own action runners are getting rate limited atm
You tell engineers and engineering leaders to "just add this one feature, it's really important, what's the ETA? No, that's too late, the market will have moved on, this is existential, you're a bottleneck," fire, hire, fire, hire. Meanwhile the CEO feels great, because they're delivering. The reports look nice, the posts get written, the lectures get given on X and LinkedIn about what steering a ship really means.
Then the issues that required your system to actually be robust, the ones that required engineers to have spent the time engineering, show up. And it's way too late. You cannot move faster, no matter how much money you throw at it.
It gets bad enough that everyone is now telling the CEO 70% of the platform needs refactoring, and even that is like solving the three-body problem, because every domain boundary is broken. Claude can't reason about any component of the system but is very confident it understands it, and ten seconds later tells you "You're right! And I won't sugarcoat it, I completely misrepresented this concept, let me go fix that by rewriting this other module."
You can't rebuild GitHub. You can't rebuild components of it in reasonable time over live data and migrate over without very public incidents. So now the CEO feels very, very dumb, and can't admit it.
Meanwhile a new company capitalizes on your lack of leadership and launches a competitor...and the cycle starts anew.
Also OSS like forgejo is taking off too.
They announced this on the day of the outage, yesterday.
+-------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Total storage limit | Unlimited |
| Git request rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 500+/s/repo) |
| API rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 15k+/s) |
| Max repos | Unlimited |
| Concurrent writes | 30+ |
| Repository size limit | 32TB |
| Git LFS | Supported |
| GitHub/3rd party sync | Supported |
+-------------------------+-------------------------------+
Their APIs are garbage from an agentic perspective. Try using Terraform to curate your GH org of a few hundred repos. Just running the `tf plan` will take 10min, because it's making thousands of API calls. Where's the bulk and batch APIs? No such thing. They are simply not agentic scale. Want to rerun the plan for your entire cloud vendor with thousands of VMs, IAM roles, buckets, etc... it'll run faster than checking on your repo labels.
GH needs rewritten from the ground up. The "repo is everything" arch has been creaking and falling over form many years now.
I am seriously, 100%, contemplating the idea of offering consulting for migrating companies and projects out of Github. Given that I am fully employed, I'd only be able to do this on the weekends. Could I get a show of hands to get an idea of potential customers?
Once this is done, the team would have two possible git remotes to work with. Given that gitea also allows mirroring with Github, the team would be able to even switch to Gitea as the "main" git remote and for PR reviews even if the CI part is still on Github.
The harder part would be migrating the CI jobs. But this also can be done in parallel and no one needs to cut out their Github actions immediately. Start with the simplest of the stages, e.g, the automated test suite, and once you get the whole pipeline from Woodpecker on an staging environment, you'd could take another weekend to test the whole workflow. Once the first project is successfully migrated, it becomes a matter of repeating the process.
Woodpecker is still a bit finicky and debugging it can be a bit annoying, but given that it's all based on docker it is a lot easier to debug a pipeline locally.
For a 20–30 dev team I'd be happy to help work through what that rollout would actually look like
Our runners are faster, our CI is smoother than ever. Transitioning was a matter of a few hours, which we took as a fun hackaton.
Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t), go hit the gym or walk outside.
If a work tool going down triggers you enough mentally to start angrily ranting online, it’s a sign you need to chill out and focus more on your health
This should not be an excuse since they probably can use AI to fix it /partially sarcasm
Edit: it seems GHE is also affected by the outage and isn't much better.
- we are getting no benefit beyond getting excuses replies to our emails - right or wrong, but we depend heavily on GitHub actions so this has a very real impact on us
There is no separate enterprise platform unless you buy their self hosted server product.
But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house.
And I don't think that GitHub is devoid of SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
The issue is that they're not achieving two nines uptime in practice.
I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.
It's not all that different from, say, an AWS region having a service impact. People would rather complain about AWS than prepare and utilize a well-tested recovery plan to shift to a standby region. Oftentimes there's no fallback plan because the business already considered it and decided it was too costly relative to the benefit, but when the incident happens, they still can't help but complain. Humans being humans.
However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...
Github does have an SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla. But like virtually all SLAs, it's really just a token gesture. I have never seen an SLA that pays the losses you suffer due to the outage.
not to mention that any business which could potentially lose enough money that they would need to let go of developers from a github outage should probably already have some business continuity plans in place.
My significant other was just let go from their job as a scapegoat for an organizational error: 3 layers of failure - IC, manager, director, and the IC was let go. The error caused a 7 figure loss for the company that has 10 figures of revenue per year. The manager and director may not see any consequences, though the director will probably be forced out by end-of-year due to incompetence. The new executive has taken to firing employees much more eagerly than their predecessor, like some sort of Jack Welch acolyte.
Their firing has put a lot of things into perspective for me. Mostly, fuck "at-will" employment and its negative effect on the American social contract.
But also this "angry ranting" online that the original poster was referencing. Not everyone has the privilege to calmly respond to things that directly impact their livelihood.
- Have never seen it mentioned on this forum, in any context.
- We're potentially pursuing legal action.50% of social media traffic is bots and i want to believe
My SO was fired - this isn't a Google review where we were treated poorly at a restaurant.
we do not bill.
the outages they promised their customers are now different.
this has costs for everyone downstream.
It all ties back to the OP, where the issue you've might not be as bad as you think. I have been in situations where we have dropped all procedures to push a hot fix because we were actively bleeding money, and in situations where you know there is an issue, and you let it be.
Maybe I pay for a service and I want that service to work consistently during core business hours.
With every single of these enterprise 'cloud' offerings you are giving (almost) complete power over your business/project to somebody else who couldn't care less about your success or failure, you are simply irrelevant for them. I see it at work too, every time critical external systems go down whole bank stops still, just because few bucks were saved yearly on some on-prem servers.
Look at it this way, you are learning some important lesson today and finding great area of improvement for resiliency from now on.
Please read https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-rea...
> Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t)
Oh, we do. Given the sheer number of users, it's almost guaranteed someone is on fire ever time GitHub is down. Statistics is a very charming branch of reality.
Which means they have a pricing problem. Rate limit non-paying users.
It's absurd that I have dozens of repos, many with GH Actions that run CI, test and then package and push to prod/package managers, and haven't paid GH anything.
I sympathized with them when they said this a handful of months ago, but then I saw this [0] page that shows how it's been shot for years prior (which tracks with my memory).
I feel for the GH engineers that have to deal with this, especially the SREs. I also don't hate the downtime right now, as I'll make a cup of coffee and do something else. I will say though, I did have a hotfix a week or so ago during the Actions outage, which really was a pain.
You're right that getting angry and ranting isn't the right reaction here, but I do no give them the LLM load excuse. I don't give them an out for having awful uptime during work hours for a product we pay quite a bit for as an org.
This is the outcome of violating single responsibility principle in business.
Or, maybe your #1 IT priority was moving everything to Azure instead ;)
Largest shareholder (27%), not majority.
My mind immediately went to this classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/303/
The idea that we should be fine with this unreliability is just amazing. It's not a mental health issue to have problems when important infra fails.
the comment doesnt say you should be "fine" with the unreliability.
they are saying people shouldnt get so emotionally worked up over it. which, while i wouldn't phrase it in the way the parent did, i agree with the direction of their point.
"Github’s servers are constantly on fire as their usage increased something like 50x due to LLM sloppers pushing large amounts of trash code"
"Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t), go hit the gym or walk outside." with assumptions like above.
If it was, "hey they f*ed up but there's no point having an overly emotional reaction" that would be fine. But he seems to be justifying this. Especially with Github's record up to now of unreliability I think it's completely fair to be annoyed.
However, your "(you don't)" comment is not going to calm down all the people, who, you know, DO have a hotfix to push now, and DO have an angry customer that could not care less for which part of our infrastructure is breaking _their_ workflow.
The only things would calm everyone down is guarantee that Microsoft would be paying for _our_ SLA breach compensation. But they don't. And I don't think anyone is paying their GH bill with a prorata of the number of time the platform was actually available.
(I'm also aware that the wording of the contract probably clearly says that you should not use GitHub for anything critical, that Microsoft is only a small startup in their garage, that you can't credibly expect 90% uptime anyway, and that it's all the fault of LLM slop ! Bad LLM slop ! Also, please buy our LLMs to generate more slop, please.)
Is this rage bait? Isn't Google, Amazon, and all the other services in the world similarly impacted by LLM's? Isn't Claude, OpenAI, etc.? Why can they handle the load but not Github?
Which they encouraged by pushing Copilot down everyone's throat
I’m not a Meta fan but it’s interesting that they manage to keep their systems up with an order of magnitude more traffic. GitHub’s uptime is inexcusable.
github enterprise is fully operational at the moment
https://eu.githubstatus.com/posts/dashboard
We cannot pull any actions images (or how it is called) for example.
So with the "elapsed time" out of the way (now over an hour, incidentally), how about "how long will it be down?"
They could easily tighten things up in that regard, and make a choice that is right for their main users at the expense of The MS corpo mandate/mission. It is a choice to do otherwise.
No qualifiers necessary. But try arguing with a lawnmower...
Github and their parent company are active participants in pushing LLM-driven coding.
Secondly, the scale is WAY off and makes it look far worse than it is. It makes it look like 99.5% availability is practically zero availability.
Finally, GitHub’s availability is not a binary all-or-nothing proposition. They report incidents on a granular level, for example, webhook firing can be impaired while Git hosting may be working fine.
I have little time in my day to spend with my daughter. But I also have responsibilities. And one client has decided to bet on github. It's the only client I've ever worked with who has their code on github. EVERY other client has hosted their own gitforge or used bitbucket.
So now I am not angry because some critical piece of US-american infrastructure is down all the time.
I am angry because instead of spending time with my daughter I have to work on this later, because there are due dates and "Well, fucking GitHub was down" ain't gonna cut it.
hey bud your bias is showing
I find it hard to believe that github APIs don't have rate limits to handle traffic spikes.
If they are facing an influx of commits from bots maybe they need to start metering commits from those accounts and charge them money.
This is a self imposed problem.
They get paid millions of dollars by my company. They need to get it together.
If people and companies are paying for critical infra they expect it to be available - it's not MY problem that their servers are on fire - last time I checked, having too much demand was a good problem to have and they've had over a year to fix it and come up with a plan.
I'm so glad I migrated to GitLab months ago.
Github.com's promise is that it can be the central broker of open source code because it is reliable.
That promise hasn't been kept recently.
That said, Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales. It was a sign of growth that couldn't be properly managed but there was not viable alternative.
Hard but not impossible. Being unreliable might nudge a few people. Also, Twitter had their fail whale in their early phase (mostly), not twenty years or so into their existence.
The issue with replacing Github is that it takes more than version control and issue tracking to replace the network that is Github. It's effectively the largest social network for software developers on this planet.
Tangled (tangled.org) is built on the at protocol (bluesky) and seems like an interesting take on this. Most other solutions seem to just move the problem to another much smaller silo (gitlab, codeberg, etc) or throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances.
A federated approach seems like it is directionally right. Tangled is far from feature complete but I like the direction and it probably is a bit more resilient against global outages like this. I'm not a user yet but I'm keeping an eye on it.
May I ask what networking with other instances brings? Git is decentralised, so it works with self-hosted instances, right?
But if you want more than what email can offer, social networking is a thing with Github and it's a big reason for its success. It added a friendly UI and a way for users to engage with each other via issue trackers, pull requests, and all the rest. It has tens of millions of users that have accounts that each can each create issues, pull requests, fork each other's projects, etc. These people collaborate with each other on many millions of projects. The network effect of all these people being in one place where they can collaborate is vital to a lot of open source projects.
It's effectively the largest developer centric social network around. If the open source community fragments over a gazillion self hosted servers that each require a signup that don't really federate any signins and that don't allow aggregating notifications from all the projects you contributed to, etc. it would be a big loss for the open source world.
Tangled by making use of the atproto replicates much of this functionality. While also allowing people to run their own nodes and while allowing users and their projects to be moved between those nodes. That makes it the best of both worlds. You can self host it but without completely disconnecting from the community.
Assuming that everybody moves to your community (in this case the atproto one). Then the ActivityPub people ask you to join their community, and so does every new community that wants to become the new standard.
That's the thing with every new social network: "You don't want to be locked into the current community that is not my community, instead you want to move to my community, which is the best! And if you do, and convince everyone around you to join as well, then you will only ever need one account for everything!".
And now, assuming that most people leave GitHub and join Tangled, it will be to the detriment of the minority that is not using Tangled. If I host a repo on SourceHut, nobody will contribute because they want GitHub. If Tangled replaces GitHub, will that change? I don't think so, people will just refuse to use anything other than Tangled.
What I find interesting is that you advocate for a federated system that everyone should use, because "it would be better for everybody", but the fact is that everybody has an email already. No need to create an account, we can send each other patches, it just works.
Why don't you promote email? Because it's not your preference.
PS: I do realise that email has a lot of issues. My point is just that I avoid the entire issue by just being open to sharing my code however it works. And I feel like patches are easier to share "universally" than pull requests. Maybe I would be in favour of a new, "richer" patch format that would make it even nicer to share over whatever system I want (email, atproto, activitypub, signal, ...)?
Tangled is kind of there as an alternative that has most of the comforts of Github but is federated and can be self hosted. And there are a lot of Bluesky users that have access to it even if they might not be aware of that yet. If enough projects switch over, their contributors might follow along. If something else shows up, more power to them. But I'm not really aware of (m)any other properly federated alternatives.
The beauty of federated protocols of course is that they can be bridged and connected in all sorts of ways. Some hybrid at proto / email based bridge could be pretty doable. And if somebody wants to expose at proto feeds as activity feeds, that's probably not too technically hard either. These things aren't actually mutually exclusive.
And I am using alternatives to GitHub like SourceHut and Codeberg (and I will try Tangled).
I was just saying that federated systems don't necessarily federate well with each other.
Email is federated, and XMPP is federated, but it's not exactly nice to communicate on XMPP via email. Or between Matrix and XMPP, etc.
But of course I would be happier if Tangled (or something else federated) was the default instead of GitHub. Now to be pragmatic, a big advantage of GitHub is that open source projects get free CI runners (including macOS), and it's hard to compete with that.
e.g.: gh pr merge 5062 -R <org/repo> --squash --delete-branch
I'm going to leave them alone for the rest of the day.
They're struggling to maintain a single nine these days.
Edit: I just realised it's hosted on gh pages and therefore probably can't be updated
https://www.githubstatus.com/ is today
Or is their point about abandoned projects where the dev never clicks release after merging, or even never merges?
Self-promo links below if you would like to star a few of mine good for developers.
https://gitlab.com/architecture-decision-record
Infrastructure should be neutral. Codeberg is a social club
My wishlist: free for open source and paid for closed source, able to do simple projects that are handwritten and also complex projects including AI LLM code that needs CI/CD/auditing, and hosting in the UK or EU.
Aside, I donate money to Codeberg because I think Codeberg is a wonderful service with strong commitment to free open source, and because I host some larger projects and AI projects that are for public welfare social good.
To Tangled -- it's great that the core code is MIT licensed and anyone could stand up a competing appview (the credible-exit property of atproto).
Do Tangled Labs Oy's articles include a purpose clause instead of the default profit-only purpose[0]? Or is something similar on the roadmap?
[0] OYL 1:5 reads The purpose of a company is to generate profits for the shareholders, unless otherwise provided in the Articles of Association.
You're deliberately avoiding a network effect lock-in by being federated, you make competition trivial by giving away not only the protocol but also making your code available, and you don't even restrict commercial competition by using the MIT license rather than, say, BSL.
To me that sounds like you are deliberately starting a race-to-the-bottom competition on price with, well, everyone capable of hosting a SaaS? Heck, if you don't end up with some solid competition the whole "federated code" USP doesn't play out. To me that doesn't exactly scream "good return on my €3,8M seed round". Am I missing a brilliant plan here, or should we expect a rug pull a few years down the line?
Anyone who joins the association (small fee) can vote.
So, yes, it's technically a democracy, but it deserves extra nuance in my mind because it might not be what everyone immediately thinks a democracy should feel like.
That's a fairly good starting place. Might seem innocuous, but don't forget that "far right" has no agreed upon boundary. You might as well replace it with "wrong think" at this point.
Which, again, good for them. I could care less. I left a little over a month ago once I figured out what was going on. They are perfectly allowed their fiefdom on the internet, but I would never recommend the platform to anyone as a useful Git forge unless they happen to sit in that little thought bubble.
But that's the game, I suppose. Everyone knows what's going on and they just don't care. And so I don't care about Codeberg :)
Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation.
The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an overreliance on centralized services even though most such services are relatively easy to host yourself.
I run my own DevOps server based entirely on OSS. Is it github? No. Does it what I need it to do? Absolutely. Do I get 99.999% uptime? No, but when it's down or slow, I can fix it. When the corporate platform is down, I can only wait.
And "network effects" are not a good argument. Open Source was wildly successful long before centraliced DevOps platforms.
And in hindsight, the added friction of getting in touch with projects before being able to send them any code, was a benefit not a disadvantage. Because it acted as a barrier of entry that disincentivized alot of subpar code from hitting these projects in the first place.
Even if whoever owns and runs the infra would like that to be the case, the law of wherever they are can put restrictions on this as well.
The value these centralized services provide is the centralization itself - that makes things easy to find. Remember the web before Altavista? Finding anything was detective work, guessing domains, following links through multiple pages, digging in newsgroups, asking around, and so on.
Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
Now, if we could do something like GitHub on top of a network such as Mastodon, then we would have something that's centralized enough to be useful and distributed enough to be indestructible.
And in recent years, how is the centralized world of websearch doing?
https://www.techspot.com/news/101560-study-confirms-search-r...
> Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
None of that depends on a centralized provider. I have all the features you listed on my self-hosted platform as well.
GitLab and Codeberg can absolutely become trash, each in their own way.
The solution isn't just "migrating off of GitHub"; it's "migrating to a platform that is unownable by design, not only hope".
And there are no good enough decentralized alternatives to GitHub yet.
Tangled.org's decentralization has serious holes. Radicle made an alien universe; a niche within a niche. Also, it's already having problems with ISPs: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move
Issues/PRs/comments are records owned by their authors, not by the repo. So an issue can span N users' PDSes. That's a neat model for social media, but a forge wants the repo to be the durable owner/context of its issues and history because that's where the comment/issue/etc. logically belongs.
The solution? tangled.org acts as a super advanced cache/aggregator for that. What can possibly go wrong?
> As time goes on we are re-assessing the idea of users owning what is "collaborative data" (issues, PRs, etc.) on their PDSes - soon may come the day that an issue also lives on the knot as a source of truth, with an accompanying pointer record on user PDS to attest that it's theirs.
So, relatively, not so long ago it was pretty common to host all this stuff yourself. I don't think (or maybe don't remember) Subversion having any Web interface of its own, but, since forever Git came with GitWeb. I remember configuring it for the first time: any extra bit of configuration, especially those that resulted in some added interactive functionality seemed exciting. For a week, I'd push something to my branch and immediately refresh the browser page to see my changes reflected in the remote repository :D
The infatuation wore off very quickly: after a month I have almost forgotten the Web interface even existed.
The cycle repeated with hosted services, the addition of PR interface, the addition of "pages", the bug reports, the built-in Wiki. After discovering the new gadget and associated hype, invariably, came the realization that the predating existing functionality was... better. The PR discussion in the Web page detached from the code is a lot worse than the PR discussion in the PR itself. The built-in issue tracker doesn't come close to the stand-alone product functionality. The built-in Wiki is ridiculously underwhelming when compared to an actual Wiki.
And so was the CI. For me, it started with Gitlab. There are oh so many reasons to hate Jenkins, so, whenever anyone announced an alternative platform, I'd absolutely check it out, and so did a lot of others, I presume. I was super hyped up about the possibility of running CI from the command line, completely locally on my laptop. And then it turned out to be a bait-and-switch kind of thing. I've created monumental dozen-steps and branching pipelines connecting multiple projects only to realize that the best CI is the one that uses as little as possible of the platform tools.
In the end of the day, I came to realization, that beside the social aspect of the platform like GitHub, everything that it offers on top of the essential Git repository storage is too low quality. And so do competitors. If I was ever again tasked with setting up a company code repository storage, I'd go with a physical server attached to the local office network, unless there's no office, in which case, probably, some EC2 VM would do the job...
Places like GitHub or Gitlab lure you in with their free tier offering, where you get the storage space and some other goodies for free, but once you need to upgrade to the paid tier, you inevitably realize that it's not worth the money they charge for it.
Why do we as software engineers have set fault tolerance and high availability as the primary goal of any software / infrastructure architecture? This shows it's completely irrelevant.
The people that care left months or years ago. I'm one of them. It was really easy, Github doesn't offer anything special.
Try and run a Pagerduty with the same level of attention to detail as Github. Far fewer people use Pagerduty casually. That Github has casual users and lazy users does not mean fault tolerance and high availability are 'completely irrelevant'.
Well it's 100% down for me, so does this mean 20% of all users are fully down?
> Posted 1 minute ago. Aug 17, 2026 - 13:58 UTC
It also took them 20 minutes to realize that peoples requests to /pull/xx are not working :D
/project/product/issues/<number>
/in-product-messaging/copilot-budget-request-banner
/in-product-messaging/code-scanning-ai-findings-preview-banner
/github-copilot/chat
/_private/browser/stats
Can't even view diffs in the web interface!
I'm out! I am willing to pay ~$5-10/mo for a reliable host I can swap as painlessly as possible. Mostly just building little static sites and little PWAs, no more than 500mb a repo and 10gb total. Need a repo with PRs and issues, where people can register free account and contribute or raise issues, GH actions CI, and pages host to deploy static sites. I don't use more than 100 mins of CI a month. Any recommendations?
edit: GitLab free tier has all I need, but I kind of want to pay and have some kind of reliability (not necessarily an SLA, but). But their next tier is $29/mo, which is too much.
just shy of 3 hours to find the issue
So a "component" failed? That sounds like a software component. We just saw in https://www.wiz.io/blog/red-agent-snowflake-copilot-cicd-bug how sloppy bot coding is.
Advantage: You have to coordinate with teammates to make sure you don't need the same file at the same time.
Sometimes, not being able to work independently can be an advantage. Two people discovering they're trying to work on the same file can lead to useful conversations.
Firstly, if you email me at shawnpresser@gmail.com or DM me on twitter, I'll be happy to tell you as much as you'd like.
The whole time period was goofy. I loved it.
Imagine being a 22yo, disillusioned with your first gamedev job. Then you spend all your nights playing HoN with friends.
I played hard support each game. Back then, there was one particular bug: you used keyboard hotkeys to buy things, but the shortcut for Logger's Hatchet was very close to the shortcut for wards. And hatchet was a special item, because you weren't allowed to sell it once you bought it. So at least three or four times, I was playing crystal maiden and accidentally bought this damn hatchet -- something which only benefits melee heroes, so it's completely useless to me. And I couldn't sell it back. So I'd have to start down 225 gold. When I finally got a job at S2, that was by far the most satisfying bug fix of my life. (I changed it so that you can sell it within the initial 15 second sellback window.)
Let's see, what else...
I remember a time in 2010 when we knew Valve was coming to eat our lunch with Dota 2. So I was trying very hard to think of ways to avoid this impending doom. One day I said, I got it! Custom games! Custom games had made WC3 live long beyond the lifetime of the original game. Ditto for starcraft and a bunch of others. So, being very 22, the same night I had this idea, I wanted to test it out. I didn't ask anybody. I fired up an EC2 server (which was a new thing back then) and ran the server software on it for exactly one match, which I was observing carefully, to see if EC2 could support our server. The match went well, someone called gg, and once their stats were submitted I shut down the server and went into the office the next day about to pitch my "brilliant" plan.
When I got to the office, Sean (the admin guy, and #2 at the company) was looking a little frustrated. I told him hey, if you saw any weird activity last night, that was just me testing something. He said that was you? And my heart damn near dropped out of my chest. I said yeah. He said ok, and I go to my desk.
About 20 minutes later he pulls me into a side office where he gives me the dressing down of the century. He's like, "you didn't ask anyone or let them know what you were doing? Don't you know EC2 is so much more expensive than self hosting? And by the way, something like that is completely unrelated to what we're doing here anyway." (All of which were true!) I profusely apologized, and that was the end of custom games on HoN.
If you want some more, I can probably think of a couple others.
It's clear that updating the status page as quickly as possible isn't even something github cares about.
Status pages for large companies are social, political and legal tools, and not technical indicators. It has always been this way, and likely always will unless some laws were passed.
They're fucking useful tools of curbing shitty but not yet illegal behavior that is at BEST a dishonest attempt to avoid contractual accountability.
Yes, a fucking law. Maybe a whole set of them!
“The future is here it’s just not evenly distributed”, and that applies inside companies too.
Hard to actually judge without being in the room and knowing the team that owns the incident. And as other said, it’s pretty common IME to have a root cause but slow roll communication of it until remediation has more confidence.
It's very easy to hold any service provider responsible for their own words and deeds that no one else demanded nor commanded (selling themselves to MS, moving onto Azure, copilot stuffed into everything, the architectural garbage that is gh actions). It's very easy to judge when most of their difficulties are self-inflicted.
You excuse and understand the exception, not the norm.
It's just really weak "AI bad" snark.
- put Forgejo on a little $5 Vultr VPS (I share the VPS with other things, Forgejo doesn't need much resources. I also added some block storage to host my Docker containers in the Forgejo Docker registry)
- got a 8GB ram cheaper Hetzner VPS (you have to wait for their availability) for around 8 EUR and used that to install the CI runner
- Use Netlify for hosting static sites and PWA
It takes a bit to set up but everything works snappy, clean, and flawlessly. I have unlimited CI minutes. As a bonus I get free Docker image and registry hosting because it's included with Foregejo. I am so, so happy with it all.
Also with Forgejo you just feel like you're using something clean and solid. GitHub started to feel more and more bloated, slow, and unstable.
I don't care much about the social aspects of GitHub, but I do care a ton about hosting code for long periods of time, long after I've completely changed my personal homelab.
GitHub's most essential service for me is it being the equivalent of the Internet Archive, but for code.
Just recommend swapping vercel/netlify with something else, we had quite a few issues and high costs with them. Not opiniated here, currently using Cloudflare and BunnyCDN (which is great)
gitlab ultimate (minus support) for free, so long as licenses for all projects are OSI approved.
Forgejo has some quirks (like no ability to share workflows between private repos) but I'm happy with my choice so far.
It’s kind of a shame, because Github keeps giving me fantastic ways to toot my own horn, but I can hardly do that if I can’t improve on their numbers.
Between the git hosts things move around based on available space, IO pressure and whether it’s been recently accessed or not (spinning disks are far cheaper these days). Theoretically there will be a point where the routing becomes a problem, but probably not until there’s several hundred git hosts (I’ll probably have bandwidth problems before that happens).
I’m not sure what the largest git repo is that github has, but I can theoretically keep repos up to 1TB around (plus a sheer unlimited number of forks for the same). I imagine the API’s get problematic before git does at that point (e.g. shuffling data around is much harder than storing it).
Forgejo has been great for me too. I liked it so much, I added a feature to make it relatively easy to get up and running on exe.dev. Support for Gitea and Tangle.org is also available.
Pay every Nth month, or M months per year :-) Use the free tier features throughout.
Not a prop to GitLab, it's kindof table stakes now, just saying whichever place you go, you can find or write a migrator that will capture most of what's in GitHub, assuming their API is up long enough...
You can basically self-host your repos on a cheap VPS. I did that some time ago. You'll have to create a ssh user that has only 'git' as a shell, iirc, on that box. Works okay. But doesn't provide a web ui.
I think that's where https://git-scm.com/docs/gitweb becomes handy.
I don't understand the entitlement in your post here.
I don't need one, but I do have that because it's doing a bit more work than just git hosting (administratable access for others on the team, build actions, etc) and yes... I'm paying for it.
To diagnose at a distance it feels like they need a stronger QA process, it's a product that scales horizontally, but somehow they find a way to break it for everyone on the regular! They need less hub and more node!
Excuse me, I'm literally asking where I can pay to get the specific cloud/web-based features I listed. I'm trying hard to NOT rely on a free tier because I want to pay to have the entitlement to complain when I don't get what I paid for. You know, the way that commerce has existed for millennia. [0]
I don't know where this aggression is coming from. You seem to want me to stay on the free tier and shut up or go all locally-hosted. Great if either of those work for you, buddy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
Some honest feedback: 10 minutes of searching and reading left my ADHD brain confused about pricing and quotas. It doesn't have any numbers for what I'm getting for $4/8/12/mo. And it took me 3 reads of that page to notice that the tiers are not actually the standard tiers, but pay-what-you-can. I first jumped to the prominent table then hunted for the fine print for the quotas, didn't even the read "there is no difference between the subscriptions besides price." Then read it but my mind thought "OK, all features are available to all tiers, but at what quotas?" A normal VC backed company might hide this because they're trying to pull one over on you...
Also, "Sourcehut’s public alpha... What we consider an alpha passes for a production-ready system to some." That's a choice, I get it, but it makes me feel like I'd be jumping from one unreliable platform to another. Maybe link to your uptime? (And the real github uptime side by side :P)
Because another honest thought: unlike GitLab, which pretty much has the same shaped features and affordances that you can one-click import and things mostly work, this would be a pretty breaking change to that would be difficult to revert. I do see full data autonomy is on the roadmap too though.
> [C]hoose the subscription plan most appropriate to your means — there is no difference between the subscriptions besides price.
About uptime, what level do you expect? If you Google for "Sourcehut uptime" you will find a bunch of pages with estimates. Example: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-07-03-how-we-monitor-our-ser...
"I am willing to pay ~$5-10/mo for a reliable host... Need a repo with PRs and issues, where people can register free account and contribute or raise issues, GH actions CI, and pages host to deploy static sites."
Who wants to build something to acquire that $5-10/mo business? A VPS powerful enough to host a small repository costs more than that these days. There's no opportunity here for someone to build a Github alternative and make any money. The best parts of Github that make it worth using in the first place all come down to the size of the network and that would be extremely difficult to replicate.
It comes down to wanting to develop a SCM hosting service and hitting a $5-10/mo price point. To put that in perspective, people pay more than $5 for a latte and COGS on that is about $1.50 or less. A good customer will come in weekly or more often. I'd rather sell coffee than SaaS SCM.
Anyway, how are you going to pay engineer salaries and 24/7 support staff on a $5-10/mo product? Not to mention, you'd be hosting someone's critical infrastructure so they will have a meltdown when you inevitably make a mistake. How long are you willing to burn money before you've reached a scale where it's profitable?
It's paradoxical how all the money in tech goes to the most useless things that are a net drain on society (social media, ad tech, etc.) and we're willing to pay less for the most important things than we would for a cup of coffee.
At the prices people are willing to pay for SCM, it really has to be a complement to some other product you're offering or part of an integrated suite. It's most likely a dead end on its own.
I guess you could do it... but why? There are a thousand ways to make more money with fewer headaches. I wouldn't get into this business myself and I wouldn't fund someone else either.
Yes, you can host a repository for less than $10, but that’s not the question, is it? Can you host it cheaply enough that a customer paying $10 is a viable and worthwhile business? Can you do it for $5 all in with infrastructure, staff, and general and administrative costs? You won’t have much for a marketing budget so you’ll have to offer those free accounts with some features for viral network growth. Oh, and you’ll have to offer better uptime than GitHub. Still sound like a good idea?
It's the actions. The compute to run them isn't cheap at scale nor is the amount of auditing you need to do for security and compliance if you want enterprise/government customers.
> The best parts of Github that make it worth using in the first place all come down to the size of the network
Not intrinsically, only as a side-effect of economies of scale. At least for me. The 'social' features make it more compelling and explain its widespread adoption and thus economies of scale, but not what made github worth using for me at least. It Just Worked (TM) to unite all the work we used to do in the good ol' days via repos, patches, tickets, mailing lists, IRC, build servers, and host servers.
I don't need my own VPS running 24/7, I said maybe 100 mins of CI a month, even if I'm pushing and building while others are commenting and PRing multiple times a day, it's going to still take a fraction of that VPS capacity.
CI will be the tricky one, but I am pretty sure it can work if you keep the limits low, or price it based on usage.
I can't do it in my spare time, because then the company I work for will own it. And I can't just not be employed, because I have bills to pay.
I would love to run a small software company making products individuals can afford.
+-------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Total storage limit | Unlimited |
| Git request rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 500+/s/repo) |
| API rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 15k+/s) |
| Max repos | Unlimited |
| Concurrent writes | 30+ |
| Repository size limit | 32TB |
| Git LFS | Supported |
| GitHub/3rd party sync | Supported |
+-------------------------+-------------------------------+
You have a free bank holiday, go look at green trees, listen to birds, find somebody who's wrong on HN etc.
The only poor souls here are some github devops team (team of copilots?) and those using alternative services.
In May they had to solve for 30x growth overnight, and I would guess its closer to 100x by now. The reality is a centralized solution like this may no longer be a viable option with the scale of code generation.
Github definitely didn't 100x its paying customers, and Github Copilot doesn't seem to have any serious users. Should we really be calling it growth when revenue is flat but server load is exploding due to everyone and their cat vibecoding dozens of throwaway weekend projects?
If Github didn't have insane margins before, they are definitely hemorrhaging money now. If they want to survive they have to introduce strict rate limits and 10x "Vibecoder" pricing tier sooner rather than later - but I bet Microsoft won't let them because it would hurt their already-bad AI revenue...
What I find a bit weird is why so many people rely on it. Today we have tons of VPS providers where anyone can host their on git repo and CI/CD pipeline.
What is preventing so many people to effectively have a custom setup?
My company is still on GitHub... for now. But incidents like this are becoming more common and I'm becoming less tolerant of it. I suspect many feel the same, but it takes time to persuade the masses.
Alternative theories include "azure sucks" and "they're vibecoding everything now".
Many people suspect it's the year-long migrating to Azure and all their products instead of the things they have been using.
Whatever the actual increase in productivity may be, the commits, clones, pushes, action runs, etc. are skyrocketing.
I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
https://xcancel.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
---
edit: see a counterpoint I posted down-thread.
Manager: Why is the site down!?
Engineer: Because it can’t handle this level of traffic. We can rate limit to the level we can handle to keep the service running.
Manager: Okay, let’s do that!
Engineer: Okay. Rate limiting at N req/min.
Manager: I’m getting complaints we’re denying service to customers!? We can’t rate limit our users if they want to use it. Increase the rate limits.
I’ve had this conversation more than once in my career.
Imagine the software development lifecycle is a river blocked by several dams- necessary processes that also slow the water’s volume and speed. Writing the code was a very big dam upstream, and successive dams didn’t need to handle a lot of water. With that dam busted wide open, the torrent of code is inundating downstream processes. GitHub happens to host many of them.
Earlier this year the GitHub COO shared a post on Twitter with explosive numbers they were facing. I cannot seem to find it at the moment. (Edit: shared in other replies to this thread.)
I would argue they are. You can't cache a git repository and send people what it looked like a minute ago, because someone might have pushed 2 seconds ago.
It's all green which means it's working. Ignore the unicorn error on every page.
edit: After 5-10 minutes they got around to opening an incident and (apparently manually?) marking the API as having 'degraded performance'.
NB: I am not OP but just providing some context as to why they might think this.
Interestingly the API still works for creating an issue (but webhooks weren't fired).
It is time to give up on Github. This is just too much.
* Forgejo
Those are my favorites. Both you can self-host for your company, including CI/CD.
I started with the cloud version, then moved to self-hosted because it wasn't a big effort for our team. We also reduced our monthly invoice by about 50% after the move.
For people who want a similar experience today, I’d recommend trying Codeberg (An official instance of Forgejo) though. However, keep in mind they voted in July to ban mostly AI generated repositories. You can read about that here: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
We also have a free public Forgejo instance if you want to try it first.
(I'm only using it implicitly because it's how the blog publishing system works under the hood, but the SSG still runs locally.)
brutal
It is technically 20%, because a bunch of the requests that happen on page load do succeed. Just not the few crucial ones that are required for the page to load correctly - those return a 500 the vast supermajority of the time.
For supermajority: the construction means “beyond majority” or “above majority”, it is implemented as a higher percentage in most systems, and there is a utility in being able to refer to high ratio majority.
So people have repurposed a technical word to a general word, of roughly the same meaning.
"Disappoint" was originally the inverse of "appoint" and meant to remove from office.
Update: yes that worked. gh CLI using the API was able to make a PR while the web interface was inoperable.
Second update: defeat from the jaws of victory -- the page that displays open PRs is also down.
Third update: CI isn't working anyway, so the CLI PR creation workaround doesn't achieve much.
"Microsoft’s data-center shortages to persist longer than expected - Bloomberg"
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-data-center-shor...
Perhaps relevant tho. I would imagine if they could simply throw more hardware at it they would. And I wouldn't imagine inability to throw hardware at it would be due to software scaling issues. So perhaps it is simply lack of available hardware?
It's a shame I had to go to HN to check if I was the only one instead of relying on their status page that they link.
…& this is ignoring all the moral reason for avoiding US-based, publicly-traded, proprietary software for host largely free software. They also deny access to users due to US sanctions, privacy-conscious users won’t want to create accounts/agree to ToS, & rubbing shoulders with other corpos your project can be taken down if it upsets the corpos don’t like it (see youtube-dl, Switch emulators, etc.).
Enterprise works ok-ish, but the standard version has daily issue ever since.
They're making it very easy for a viable alternative to pop up and take their lunch - it just wont be Gitlab.
I never had to wonder if Steam is going to be working today, so I could play my game after work, but it's been an issue with GitHub since covid. At least for me.
Fortunately, due the nature of the service, I can sit out most downtimes. Most of the time at least.
gh pr review <xx> --approve
gh pr merge <xx> --squash --delete-branch
A self hosted version of GitHub that is a precise mirror of an actual GitHub repository. That is, PRs from GitHub appear on the selfhosted instance and my reviews from the self hosted instance appear on GitHub. That way I can work on my private instance when GitHub is down (or slow) and I can be assured my work still appears to everyone online.
Does this exist?
the closest thing i've found are tooks like https://github.com/raylabshq/gitea-mirror
GitHub's value is in the PR process, in CI/CD, releases, the issue tracker, and an identity system propping all of that. This is the thing to replace, and it's quite a bit harder.
> Update - We are seeing an approximate 20% error rate across numerous experiences including Pull Requests, Issues, and others. Investigations are currently under way and we will be posting updates as they become available Aug 17, 2026 - 13:45 UTC
Sure use it to collab externally, use it if you can't justify running your own infrastructure, but why are large companies choosing to place code externally - which is one secret leak away from compromise?
"Yeah we're unable to offer services, but so is [X BIG CORP] and [Y BIG CORP]. It's an industry outage, nothing we can do!"
You can use as many AI agents as you want (it won’t solve the problem), but with that many outages ever since getting bought by Microsoft, it is more than enough time to give them to change. They don’t care and there is no CEO of GitHub to help either.
A self hosted instance would have much better uptime than GitHub and GitHub Actions at this point as I predicted 6 years ago. [1]
(I know, I know, no sarcasm here, but sometimes it feels necessary.)
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-availa...
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
The question is which features do we want of Github but functioning in a distributed way?
Identity? Stars? Issues?
Or let me ask a more useful question: if we were to move, then to where? Ideally somewhere new (not Gitlab)
I suspect even poor uptime for many services is a cosmetic problem for most users.
/pull/:id/changes is not working, but /pull/:id.diff _is_. It seems parts of the API is also ok? some gh commands I tried worked.
Files changed works on the mobile app somehow. I guess a particular api version or something is down.
Anyway if someone needs files changed and merge status, check the mobile app. Past actions are also loading on that.
[Android, India]
2) Issues showed Not found.
Anyway, GitHub Actions for building new release has progress. Good enough.
I only really use GitHub if a project that I want to contribute to is already on there at this point.
On my side it is funny,I'm encountering the following errors: "no server available to process your request".
Maybe azure is out of capacity in its datacenters... Or they didn't pay the server bill.
Seriously. It seems like there’s an issue every other week. It would historically be normal to provide post mortems, and maybe I’ve missed them but seems like there are almost weekly issues and no follow up into the core reasons why.
Anyone else using Fossil?
I wonder how it made it onto GitHub.
My work llm provider is GitHub copilot and we are completely blocked since morning. My question is who’s comparable to copilot vscode and cli. Multi model is table stakes.
PS: Saw Cursor’s Origin announcement a second later.
Today I was forced to clone one because of "the incident". Which is a good thing.
Did Anthropic or OpenAI fail to sandbox their models again?
In my experience some teams move a lot faster than others and that leads to asymmetric quality. If all devs could pick up a new language and skillset overnigh then companies would have a lot more flexibility in their roadmaps, but humans don't scale that way - with or without AI.
LLM code or just terrible management?
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates?filters=%5B%22Azur...
That's not necessarily a bad thing for stability, but long-term I would not be surprised if it gets EOL-ed, or radically shrunk to just a basic Git mirroring service.
Discussion about it going ELO has been around since 2020-ish. But that is a worry i agree.
I get the feeling there is a long tail of old-school corps (migrated from the TFS days) that will keep the lights on. And for some orgs you just need "good enough" CI/CD pipelines that are reliable.
Maybe I'm a weirdo, but i find the kanban/sprint board pretty usable as well.
I think it's fine if we begin to move back towards distributed software supply chain infrastructure.
Thankfully this is encouraging me to stop working overtime for now and enjoy the rest of my night
https://docs.gitlab.com/install/docker/installation/#install...
I've talked to a number people in IT and commonly found they use Linux or Mac at home, as their daily, and Windows only at work.
Talking one of the IT works in the company I work for, they were forced to move from GitLab to GitHub because the CTO wants Microsoft everywhere. When all you know are screwdrivers, a personal will gladly use them as a hammer, punch, ....
Back in my IT days, we were pushing for marbled solutions. Example, 50% of the computers have antivirus brand Y and 50% have antivirus brand Z. Or the Windows servers used a different antivirus solution than the desktop. I don't see this anymore in the industry. One basket and all eggs go inside.
Irony, I'm updating code so our main products no longer require Windows as the host OS.
You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and solutions.
Seems like a simple solution.
Event systems have interesting ways to fail that resist throwing good engineering at them to fix. For a long time I refused to have anything to do with them, but now we have whole companies built on them and also things like React and what can you do? There are harmonic failure modes where the system doesn’t fail but an event keeps echoing forever and using up 50% of the available compute before anyone notices it’s been like that for months and slowly getting worse. And then there’s the Poison Pill where a message crashes a process, then gets picked up by the next and kills that one too until they’re all dead.
I slowly but surely lowered my expectations.
"No not like that!"
Your code will used for training and the platform enshitification has been accelerated by Microsoft. It would be wise to move to another platform or even better, host your own Gitlab/Forgejo/Gitea on a vps or at home.
It's just a constant pain in the ass.
Wherever I have anything to say I prefer ANY other gitforge over this piece of shit.
I shit on Microsoft a lot here, but it’s not because the workers are dumb or that all their products are “bad”, because they’re not. It’s because the company very clearly is only ever focused on “the next marketable product”, and will let their existing products rot.
You can see this with a lot of Microsoft products. Windows NT was a a pretty cool OS/kernel at its time. NTFS was a pretty neat filesystem when it was new. They employ smart people for enough time to make a big headline, then make no effort to keep those products any good.
https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/github-copilot
Slop code is written and pushed ...
Aug 11, 2025: Dohmke leaves the sinking ship:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/github-ceo-thomas...
This is a true AI victory.
I'm tired of these BS stories being pushed by green accounts on HN like there's some damn agenda by someone who thinks their job will be saved "if only the CEOs realized that Slopcode Bad".
How hard is it to up scale their servers though...
Yes, github now has issues. Github is always having issues.
Ffs GitHub, get your act together.
Centralization combined with massive AI demand is almost certainly the problem. If you move to GitHub Enterprise (on your own servers), you can probably exceed the availability of the current public cloud environment.
It is surprising that GHES rarely comes up as an option. It is a really good answer to this particular issue and eliminates the need to retrain the team on new tools. I understand the inclination to get salty about a vendor and cast the proverbial baby out with the bath water, but we must resist our impulses if we wish to make decisions that the business will find agreeable. The incremental additional licensing cost of moving from public cloud to on-prem is roughly $15-20 per user seat. If you only have 10-20 people using GH today and are deeply struggling with the consequences of these outages, this seems like a pretty easy decision to make.