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.