Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleksandrm | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone shed some light why GitHub is having so many problems lately?

Copy/paste of a comment I posted a couple months ago:

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.

That's fine, but rate limiting is a solved problem at this point. They need to rate-limit free accounts and be realistic about their limits instead of letting the system fail.

Probably can't do that easily due to shitty engineering decisions in the past

Or inept managers.

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.

Free (and non-free) accounts are already rate limited. The likely problem is that individual accounts/repos rarely hit those limits, instead the explosive demand is due to a massive growth in the number of small, individual projects being creatd.

The person you were applying to said “rate-limiting” but I think they meant “load-shedding”.

They were about to push a big change to actions pricing a little wihle ago and people revolted

And most of that growth is just garbage. I'm not even anti-AI, but just look at the quality of projects on GitHub these days. The site is full of spam, it's not a place for professionals anymore.

Their infrastructure is buckling under increased demand from AI generated code.

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 mean, that’s what they say but it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Which other major service struggles so much with basic scaling? They’re not serving streaming video, they’re not a real-time system. Any problems scaling should have been fixed years ago. Especially with all of Microsoft’s resources behind them.

> they’re not a real-time system

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.

I think the most charitable theory is that they're seeing rapidly growing usage (more users churning out higher volumes of code, via LLMs), and are struggling to scale to meet demand.

Alternative theories include "azure sucks" and "they're vibecoding everything now".

They say it's the skyrocketing load because of AI tooling

Many people suspect it's the year-long migrating to Azure and all their products instead of the things they have been using.

People will say LLMs but the issues with GitHub long predate LLMs. It all started when Microsoft acquired them.

Github's, COO Kyle Daigle, claimed that the number of commits has increased 14x since last year. So shear scale has something to do with it. I don't know of too much software already operating a planetary scale that could easily absorb a 14x bump in a year.

GitHub is pretty tiny compared to something like YouTube and Instagram. Both of which have much better uptime.

14x is barely an order of magnitude

seriously. if you are ready to scale, you are ready for that much. if that kills you, you had architecture issues that a company as big and established as GH shouldn't have.

Microsoft simply can not make software anymore. I worked at S&P Global and when you work at a global-mega corp, you quickly see why they lose the ability to create anything and just acquire companies to grow.

Microsoft bought it, https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

Totally not because of their movements to Azure.

That certainly doesn't help but I'd imagine their traffic in general spiked massively with agentic interactions as well?

The CTO discussed it a few months back: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-gi...

AI-Agents are hammering GitHub.

Whatever the actual increase in productivity may be, the commits, clones, pushes, action runs, etc. are skyrocketing.

Lately? GitHub has always been bad with downtime. It hasnt got worse just more visible as people do more CI now than before.

Its all vibes man

Reply on news.ycombinator.com