Generally, you don't care if GitHub [or your inhouse equivalent] is down when no one is working. Also, if it goes down in the middle of the night and the first guy in fixes it...the difference between 1 man hour down in the morning vs. 20 man hours during the day across an entire team is significant.
There are very valid reasons for both choices.
It is fortunate, then, that all GitHub customers are in the same timezone!
It might not be affordable for daily works, but perfect for critical issues.
Your question is too vague. Github is up enough that I don't care. However, it's down enough I wouldn't want to not be able to deploy because it's down. Therefore, I may mirror my repo somewhere else. That's easy because git is decentralized. It's a lot cheaper than running some alternative that I guarantee is always running. You can do this by simply pushing to a mirrored remote branch.
If you're just interested in the subject, research high availability.