Embarrassing that a multi-billion dollar corporation that other billion dollar corporations depend on seems to be fine with breaking their clients workflows. Was github always this shoddy or has something changed to cause this many outages?
AI coding. Which can be interpreted one of two ways:
* The generous way, which is that Github is so overloaded with massive volumes of AI codebases and AI-driven automation that they're hitting a scale they never anticipated; or
* The not-so-generous way, which is that Github itself was one of the first companies to push everyone to AI code as much as possible, which has lead to an eventual breakdown of the stability of the system, as the people responsible for it no longer understand how it actually works, leading to production outages once every few days.
Also, the uptick in odd issues post acquisition pales in comparison to the scaling issues they've had over the past 1-2 years. As a matter of scale, trying to link this back to Azure doesn't really square. If anything they'd potentially be in a worse spot without having access to the resources of a massive public cloud..
The other issue of trying to quietly move terabytes of information while the site is live hasn't helped either. Add in the challenge of keeping highly customized bare-metal databases in sync with a cloud environment isn't easy.
Its this very very very complex migration that's resulted in a lot of the ongoing issues.
https://hostingjournalist.com/news/microsoft-accelerates-git...
The migration underscores Microsoft’s strategy to unify its AI and developer ecosystems under Azure, bolstering performance and reliability for Copilot and related AI workloads. However, not all GitHub employees are confident in the transition. Internal concerns have surfaced about potential service disruptions, particularly given the complexity of moving GitHub’s massive MySQL clusters, which currently run on custom bare-metal infrastructure.
Outages have become more frequent in recent months, a symptom of GitHub’s growing operational strain. Insiders suggest the platform’s infrastructure - originally designed to handle conventional development workloads - is now being pushed to its limits by large-scale AI integrations and surging user activity.
I'm sure there were, every plan has detractors. Azure has bare metal offerings; does GitHub have access to them? Vladimir Fedorov, GitHub CTO, cited constrained capacity in their data centers and accelerating Azure migration as critical for them to deal with the increased AI load.
IDK, but again as a matter of degree the big issues they are having seem more strongly correlated with agentic coding explosion. In fact it motivated their accelerated migration plans.
And of course, Microsoft is saying that none of this downtime is at all related to them moving everything to Azure, and also at the same time they'll fix all this downtime by finishing moving everything to Azure.
I wouldn't hold my breath here.
The data speaks clearly: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/