An update on GitHub availability

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/

by salkahfi • 3 months ago

421 250 3 months ago

mijoharas3• 3 months ago

we started working on path to multi cloud.

Is this microsoft stating that they aren't able to get acceptable reliability from Azure? (I mean, I think a lot of us have heard that, but it's interesting to hear it from microsoft themselves).

derwiki• 3 months ago

It’s pretty damning. But as someone who has used Azure, I buy it.

everfrustrated2• 3 months ago

Pretty damming that two Microsoft subsidiaries - GitHub and LinkedIn - either shelved their forced migration to Azure or are looking at non-Azure options.

jasoncartwright3• 3 months ago

Seems pretty sensible to not rely on a single provider for their large complex system?

mijoharas3• 3 months ago

I mean, amazon (shopping, along with prime video e.t.c.) runs on AWS.

cyanydeez• 3 months ago

This isn't a mom and pop shop. They have locations all over the world: https://datacenters.microsoft.com/

There's no intrinsic reason they should be vulnerable to themselves.

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

Man, you should have been there 6 months ago when they decided to start tearing down GitHub's own data centers and move everything exclusively to Azure. Seems they themselves realized this after they started moving, but imagine if you could have helped them realize this before they even started :)

cbg0• 3 months ago

I think this is more tailored towards enterprise clients that lose money when Github is down, that would probably help with retention.

bombcar• 3 months ago

You’d think they could have had the existing GitHub on whatever continue as is (maybe for paying customers) while all the AI new inrush goes to the Azure setup.

jofzar• 3 months ago

Yeah that's a top tier enterprise plan feature if I have ever seen ut

jansan2• 3 months ago

The entire concept of multi cloud is amusing if you think what cloud originally was supposed to be. They could call them meta clouds (might infringe trademarks), and with the current growth trajectory of AI generated code eventually multi-meta-clouds, renamed to beyond-clouds, and then multi-beyond-clounds. I see no limits.

youwangd• 3 months ago

Show HN timing matters more than people think. Monday-Thursday, 9-11am Pacific, is when the front page has the most engaged readers. Weekend posts get less competition but also less engagement.

zamalek4• 3 months ago

There was somewhat recently a post here about how priorities, pressure, and management subverted Dave Cutler's vision for Azure (which was to have near zero human involvement) - my Google fu isn't strong enough to find it. Supposedly, someone running over or opening a serial to a rack/VM is now typical operational procedure.

ok_dad• 3 months ago

This one?

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...

pbronez• 3 months ago

perhaps https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... ?

tedd4u2• 3 months ago

multi-cloud

XXXXL size project. May not ever deliver. But if it fails, it will only do so after years grinding through people, resources, etc.

pluc• 3 months ago

There are no words that Microsoft can use that would make me trust Microsoft.

baq• 3 months ago

openai, anthropic, google and a plethora of chinese models all end up pushing code into github. you can discuss whether gpt 5.5 is better than opus 4.7, but for github it doesn't matter: they'll be receiving the code no matter which llm spits it out.

amazing on one hand, quite scary on the other for github and all other forges if this continues and there is no reason why it wouldn't.

graemep2• 3 months ago

Simple solution: charge all users. Charge more for higher usage.

gattr• 3 months ago

And/or provide a baseline free tier, corresponding to how much a typical human user would at most push/clone etc. They have pre-LLM statistics on that.

jcattle• 3 months ago

When there's a gold rush invest in checks notes jewellery makers?

huijzer2• 3 months ago

I’m pretty sure my Forgejo instance on a Raspberry Pi is outperforming GitHub reliability. It’s faster that’s for sure.

huijzer2• 3 months ago

Why the downvotes? I’m serious. On GitHub I’ve experienced many downtimes. My Forgejo hasn’t gone down yet apart from reboots by me.

darkwater2• 3 months ago

Glad that they released some data about new repo/issues/commits over the last years. It confirms what everyone else already believed from the outside: agents are putting a lot of extra, sudden pressure on GitHub. It's like a startup that is growing exponentially, with the difference that they already have a large user base to serve - and that keeps them in the bullseye - and probably a not-so-fast-moving organization when it comes down to changes. On the other side of the coin, they also have a lot of talent, infra and money a startup might not have yet.

maccard7• 3 months ago

What data is that? There's an unlabelled graph and a number at the current peak.

ncruces5• 3 months ago

Some previous numbers: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

darkwater2• 3 months ago

IMO it transmits the magnitude of the impact pretty well.

frangonf• 3 months ago

What are we doing?

Stop subsidizing tokens now that we extracted enough training data from you and we have enough agentic junkies business to keep the flywheel going up and cut on the loss leaders. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47923357

guidoiaquinti• 3 months ago

While we were already in progress of migrating out of our smaller custom data centers into public cloud, we started working on path to multi cloud. This longer-term measure is necessary to achieve the level of resilience, low latency, and flexibility that will be needed in the future.

Wild

maccard7• 3 months ago

It's kind of hard to read this with a straight face.

The unlabelled graph with big numbers on top, the priorities that don't match with what we're experiencing, and a list of things that they're doing without a real acknowledgement of the _dire_ uptime over the last 12 months....

ramon1562• 3 months ago

"We hear you" in ~300 words, basically.

ncruces5• 3 months ago

More numbers: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

What's the question here, you don't believe growth is currently exponential, or do you think it shouldn't be hard to scale, when 10x YoY is not enough?

OtherShrezzing2• 3 months ago

As a business user, our costs have gone up while service has gone down dramatically. Meanwhile our marginal cost to GitHub has hardly changed. Where our costs to them have increased, they mostly charge us per cpu minute, so obviously aren’t making any kind of loss on our account.

I’m sure they’re experiencing scaling issues across the platform, but it’s unacceptable for that to have a negative impact on us when we're sending them $250/dev/yr for (what is in all honesty) hosting a bunch of static text files.

maccard7• 3 months ago

These numbers should have been in the blog post, not the graphs that are present.

What's the question here, you don't believe growth is currently exponential, or do you think it shouldn't be hard to scale

I think you're putting words in my mouth here; I didn't say either of those things. I'm saying that this blog post is a meaningless platitude when the github stability issues predate this, and that all this post says is "we hear you're having issues".

ferguess_k• 3 months ago

You can do the same with so many clients.

georgyo• 3 months ago

These are not the worst graphs in the world... Sure the bottom left axis is not labeled, but it still conveys the point correctly. The growth between 2023->2024->2025->2026 is growing quickly. And that in the end/beginning of 2026 they say more growth than the three years before, combined!

You don't need to know the bottom left axis number. We do have to assume the graph is linear, and not some kind of negative exponent log graph. But given the rest of the content, I think that is safe to assume.

Any company that experiences significantly more growth than they were planning for will have capacity issues.

The priorities are most inline with that. The are way beyond the point that they can just add more hardware. They need to make the backend more efficient, and all the stated goals are about helping there.

maccard7• 3 months ago

These are not the worst graphs in the world... Sure the bottom left axis is not labeled, but it still conveys the point correctly.

No, they're completely useless. Using the "New repos per month" as an example, if the bottom left is 1m, then that's a 20x increase in 2 years which is a lot. If the bottom left is 19m, it's a 5% increase in 2 years which is nothing.

The massive surge on their labelled X axis starts in 2026, and these issues have been going on for a lot longer than that. GHA has been borderline unusable for a year at this point, if not longer.

But given the rest of the content, I think that is safe to assume.

The rest of the content is "we're working on it", and "here's two outages in the last 14 days, one of which caused actual data loss"

johndough2• 3 months ago

You don't need to know the bottom left axis number.

We very much do. The graph suggests an insane growth in PRs from almost zero to 90M. Now compare this misleading graph with this much clearer one, which shows that the growth over the last three years has been less than 80%: https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/octoverse-202...

PunchyHamster3• 3 months ago

You mean since GH acquisition 6 years ago https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

nraynaud• 3 months ago

So I gather that nobody is working on a search that stays on the current branch?

fontain2• 3 months ago

Personally, I’m sympathetic. We know that GitHub did a huge amount of work over the last decade to make Git scale, which has benefited us all. These new scaling challenges are real challenges, 30x growth would be a nightmare for any system that was already pushing the limits of what was possible, I think we are being far too hard on GitHub, they deserve a little grace.

someone_eu• 3 months ago

GitHub's scaling issues are caused by their own vendor-lock approach and monopoly. Yes, of course _their_ goal is to be even bigger and even more all-consuming, so _they_ have to deal with the scale. Why a user would be sympathetic to that?

The user (and not a big tech monopoly) answer to scaling issues is almost always to stop scaling and start federating and interoperating.

remus2• 3 months ago

For all the negatives about github I agree. They offer a lot of free stuff, and LLMs seem likely to put massively increase their costs with no guarantee they'll be making money off it. I can't think of many (any?) large businesses which could scale up to meet so much new demand without some significant growing pains along the way.

icy7• 3 months ago

I'm biased (founder of tangled.org), but the future really should be federated forges. Host repositories on sovereign infra with global identity + federated "metadata" (issues, pulls, etc.).

Global indices for this should be trivial to spin up so availability is never a concern (we're working towards this!).

ramon1562• 3 months ago

Love the idea, would replace the LLM generated content ony our site, though.

I recently migrated to codeberg because I'm okay with self-hosting big runners, while using codeberg's available runners for smaller cron-based things (they even have lazy runners for this).

icy7• 3 months ago

It’s… all hand written? We just sound “professional”.

ArcHound2• 3 months ago

But, there are? I can host a repo on GitHub, Codeberg and self host it too. Then I need to watch over main to keep it consistent between those. After that's established, I can do updates from wherever. Link'em in the README.

nibbleyou• 3 months ago

There's also a tool to automatically push it to multiple repos: https://github.com/prashantsengar/GitEcho

Disclaimer: the author is a colleague of mine

Though to be fair, what the parent meant by federated forges is different than this approach.

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

There are distributed forges? Yes, git is distributed, but often everything around it isn't. The case parent is trying to make, is that the rest ("federated forges") should also be distributed, not just git.

beernet2• 3 months ago

What is "sovereign infra" exactly?

tfrancisl2• 3 months ago

No less than self hosted, imo. If youre on some cloud it doesnt really matter that you pay them absurd amounts of money, you arent sovereign.

mathgeek2• 3 months ago

I know it's just marketing speak, but the term made me think of the scenes in the Matrix where what's left of humanity (ignoring all the cyclical lore that was added on top of it) has to make sure the machines can't remote in to any of their tech.

sikozu2• 3 months ago

I've never heard of this before, going to sign up and check it out!

icy7• 3 months ago

Thanks! If you need anything, email me anirudh@!

ljm2• 3 months ago

I would love if it coding agents didn't default to GitHub for their deep VCS integration.

If I could get the same bells and whistles by wiring up another forge, so long as it offered a decent API and/or sent events over a webhook, I'd have everything self-hosted.

The agents would need to expose an interface on their own end but as long as you implemented it with a plugin, it'd take the dependency of GitHub and you could use MCP or skills for the rest of it.

icy7• 3 months ago

The neat thing about Tangled is it's built on an open protocol (https://atproto.com)—this allows us to effectively build an API-free system since all data on Tangled can effectively be ingested via the AT Protocol firehose.

Which is to say, this is perfect for agents given they don't need any bespoke SDK from us: simply write Tangled records for issues, pulls, whatever to your PDS and it'll show up on Tangled. We plan to start working on some exemplar agents first-party that would 1. enhance Tangled itself, 2. showcase cool things you can do with an open data firehose.

iso1631• 3 months ago

the future really should be federated

The internet should not be centralised, but you can't make a billion dollar company without capturing the world and selling your company to a trillion dollar company

PunchyHamster3• 3 months ago

It's cute idea but most people don't want to host their own stuff.

And if they are using 3rd parties to host their stuff, inevitable 1-3 big players will show up offering that as a service.

And even if you do host your own stuff to avoid availability problems, the big actors can still fail just like GH and you can't do shit coz your dependencies need it.

So the solution is same as it is now, proxy or mirror everything you use

icy7• 3 months ago

Yeah that's fine, we offer first-party hosting for free forever.

jftuga• 3 months ago

Some interesting tid bits:

* we had to resolve a variety of bottlenecks that appeared faster than expected from moving webhooks to a different backend (out of MySQL)

* * redesigning user session cache to redoing authentication and authorization flows to substantially reduce database load.

* we accelerated parts of migrating performance or scale sensitive code out of Ruby monolith into Go.

I'd like to know what database backend they migrated to. I was also surprised to read that the migration from Ruby to a more performant language had not already been completed. I assume this is because it a large code base with many moving parts, etc.

mohsen12• 3 months ago

Another interesting bit: they are hitting performance issues due to the rise of monorepos. GitHub and frankly Git were not designed for monorepos

ghthor• 3 months ago

Yet the Linux kernel is a monorepo

rootnod3• 3 months ago

Our priorities are clear: availability first

That's a delayed April fool's right?

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

No, just a 6 month old memo that was first opened today, as they said literally the same 6 months ago.

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

Hah, love that now they say "Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features" when 6 months ago, it was seemingly exactly the same except Azure supposedly was gonna save them:

GitHub Will Prioritize Migrating to Azure Over Feature Development - GitHub is working on migrating all of its infrastructure to Azure, even though this means it'll have to delay some feature development.
In a message to GitHub’s staff, CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data center. “It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot, which are changing how people use GitHub,” he writes.

https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

So the currently delayed feature development is now gonna be further delayed, yet almost every week we see new features and changes, just the other day the single issues view was changed, as just one example. And it was "existential" 6 months ago yet they keep stumbling on the exact same issue today?

Even if they're focused exclusively on reliability and uptime, we get the experience that we have today, kind of incredible how a company with the resources of Microsoft seemingly are unable to stop continuously shot themselves in the foot. It's kind of impressive actually. As icing on the cake, they've decided to buy up all popular developer services then migrate them all to the same platform, great idea too.

ncruces5• 3 months ago

So the currently delayed feature development is now gonna be further delayed, yet almost every week we see new features and changes, just the other day the single issues view was changed, as just one example.

They did that as a panic mode hack to mitigate performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912521

madeofpalk2• 3 months ago

This seems uncharitable. Priorities aren't exclusive, especially at scale across large engineering orgs like GitHub. It could be that these are the top level priorities, but teams or individuals who aren't able to contribute to these priorities will work on other things like new features.

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

Ditto. I agree though, just because the priority is reliability, doesn't mean others can't work on features, especially features that might help with reliability, which I read was the motivation behind the new single-issue view, so that's my bad, might have been a bit much.

I still think the rest of my point stands, especially the last one which is the move that has the biggest impact to the most of us developers.

voncheese• 3 months ago

Agree that priorities aren't exclusive and there may be teams/individuals that aren't able to contribute if they stay in their current teams/roles

Where it becomes questionable though is when enough progress isn't being made on the top priority (reliability). If Github is being true to their word, they need to be pulling people off of teams that are working on features to work on reliability so that top priority gets the resourcing it needs.

Given the pace of improvement, and the cited example of moving to Azure from months ago, it's not super clear they are doing that. Also not clear that they aren't, maybe the move to Azure is just a more than 6mo project no matter how many people are on it.

saghm2• 3 months ago

No, but they are ordered generally, and in this case they are explicitly saying that availability should come first

dangus3• 3 months ago

Why do we need to be charitable to Microsoft?

Did we lose our ability to consider them the evil empire?

rwmj2• 3 months ago

It's entirely possible the move to Azure has made the availability problems worse. Dedicated hardware is much more predictable than cloud. "Let's not move to Azure and instead buy a few more racks" was likely a decision beyond the pay grade of github's management.

0xy• 3 months ago

Azure is easily the least reliable and least secure of the 3 hyperscalers, which is crazy because GCP was an also-ran underdog not that long ago.

AntiUSAbah• 3 months ago

I mean its Microsoft and its Azure. How much can go wrong clicking yourself a few/hundred non autoscaling normal VMs?

There is so much workload running on Azure, i never heard of VMs go away.

If Microsoft can source hardware for Azure, Microsoft can source hardware for Github.

code2die• 3 months ago

Moving to cloud makes scaling much easier and faster than colo data centers, though it cost more and might not be as reliable.

giancarlostoro• 3 months ago

If they had not added or changed any features to GitHub for the past 5 years, nobody would be upset, and yet, they keep changing it. It's a website that doesn't need to be reworked every five minutes. I assume the main development teams maintaining GitHubs codebase are ran by managers who cannot justify their jobs unless they deliver new features for the sake of delivering new features to keep their jobs going, and / or in the hopes of getting new people to join GH, when in reality the more they wind up breaking, the more the opposite becomes true.

They severely nerfed their search, I'm not sure why every other major tech company (Google - Search and YouTube) keeps breaking search for everything when it was working fine previously.

What's a bigger joke is Microsoft has Azure DevOps which looks like it might be abandoned? But then you also have GitHub... My least favorite thing about both is the ticketing system, I cannot believe that I'd ever utter the phrase "I miss Jira" when every Jira project I've ever been in had been so inconsistently setup, every, single, one.

JCTheDenthog• 3 months ago

What's a bigger joke is Microsoft has Azure DevOps which looks like it might be abandoned?

My favorite was trying to figure out how to publish debug symbols with NuGet packages to Azure DevOps artifact feeds. Horrible documentation and I was never able to get it figured out.

greatgib• 3 months ago

What they nerfed the most is the basic feature of the PR diff view.

It's only job is to display diff and review comments and it easily hide the diff for files that are a lit bit longer and hide comments when you have more than a dozen. You need to click to see. It's impossible to search in diff without going through it to expand everything.

And a ton of things are regression compared to working with pr a few years ago. Including being a lot worse in terms of latency!

jamesfinlayson5• 3 months ago

They severely nerfed their search

This always kills me. It used to work so well, and now it doesn't seem to work at all if not logged in, and not particularly well if you are logged in.

cedws• 3 months ago

I wonder if they’ll end the free lunch we’ve been having since the MS takeover. There’s been a deluge of spam and crapware projects due to the LLM wave which is visible in that graph. Can’t see them sustaining being a public dustbin for low value projects forever.

sbarre2• 3 months ago

I could see them expiring/archiving/deleting inactive projects after some time.

I feel like this would have negative impacts (lots of interesting historical archives on Github) but maybe if a project hasn't been touched, or cloned, in some time, it just gets deleted with some notice.

rmunn• 3 months ago

Thing is, projects that don't get touched for months and months are the least costly. Disk space is cheap; what's costly is compute time to process new commits, new/updated/closed issues, new/reviewed/merged PRs, and so on. Inactive projects just sit there taking up disk space but basically zero compute time. So it would make no sense at all for them to delete old, inactive projects. (Which doesn't mean they won't do it: they might have hidden costs I'm unaware of, or they might make stupid decisions. People do make stupid decisions sometimes).

jamesfinlayson5• 3 months ago

I hope not but it will probably happen.

Just last week I found an interesting repo that hadn't been touched in 9 years. I immediately cloned it as it was something reverse engineered so DMCA isn't out of the question, but now I have two reasons to clone.

s_ting765• 3 months ago

Vladimir Fedorov is GitHub's Chief Technology Officer .... He currently serves on the board of Codepath.org, an organization dedicated to reprogramming higher education to create the first AI-native generation of engineers, CTOs, and founders.

I think I found the issue.

dude2507112• 3 months ago

Sounds like a bet that AGI is not achievable.

latexr2• 3 months ago

The main driver is a rapid change in how software is being built. Since the second half of December 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply.

GitHub instability has started way before that. I understand it’s too much to ask of a trillion-dollar corporation to consider the impact of their own actions, but perhaps they should’ve thought of that before forcing LLM development down everyone’s throats.

mathgeek2• 3 months ago

While they contributed, they were still following the market trend anyway. If they weren't letting folks use it directly, other companies would have (and are).

latexr2• 3 months ago

they were still following the market trend anyway.

They started the trend with Copilot.

If they weren't letting folks use it directly

There is a chasm of difference between “letting you use it” and “forcing it down your throat”. Microsoft is doing the latter, not the former. Copilot is annoyingly present by default at every step on GitHub.

steve19773• 3 months ago

I know that I'm simplifying (probably too much), but it seems like things were fine when GitHub was still a Ruby on Rails monolith and all the rigmarole with microservices etc. only made things worse.

tankenmate• 3 months ago

This sounds more like a belief, based on little more than "correlation is causation", than analysis that controls for macro-trends backed by evidence.

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

GitHub been oscillating between long phases of "Never any new features but rock-solid and no downtime" and "New features every week but also unicorns (used to be the "service unavailable page") every week" for as long as I can remember. Seems they're on some interval switching between the two.

sgarland• 3 months ago

It is, but everyone is entitled to beliefs. Anecdotally, I feel the same way. Everywhere I’ve been, there has always been a legacy monolith that was stable as a rock, with dozens of new microservices scattered around it in an attempt to exit the monolith. The microservices have never once been stable. People fail to take the most basic things into consideration, like “you can’t have Consistency and Availability when everything is a network call.”

I’m sure survivor bias is at play here, but when I look through the older code bases - especially the data model - it’s an entirely different world than the newer stuff, and it’s clear which of the two was written by people who understand systems.

remus2• 3 months ago

Unless everything else stays the same (underlying traffic etc.) then you can't really compare. Could be that you hit some fundamental scaling limit with the old design and it completely falls over after a certain scale.

steve19773• 3 months ago

Oh as said I'm pretty sure things are more complex. It's just funny in a way that all these technologies that are usually being sold as "enablers for scale" don't seem to do their job very well.

sikozu2• 3 months ago

This latest incident was the nail in the coffin for me. I've been on GitHub since 2012 but I'm feeling the pull to migrate out to Gitea/Forgejo. Has anybody done this recently? How'd it go?

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

When one of the incident they write about here happened, I wrote about my experience moving from GitHub to Forgejo which I happened to complete just the night before that happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47878192 (lots of other people sharing their experience as replies too)

I was thinking of maybe doing a proper write up about how to host your own Forgejo + Action runners on Linux, Windows and macOS, not sure if there is enough interest. What would people for sure want to know in a guide/explanation of this?

sltr2• 3 months ago

I moved over back when GitHub was planning to charge per minute to use my own runner. It was easy with Claude, the gh API, and forgejo web API. I even set up daily backups to my S3 clone of choice.

The only repos I left on GitHub are forks and one with a bit of public engagement.

bananapub2• 3 months ago

anyone who's actually worked there, could you explain why they're finding scalability and reliability so hard? naively it seems like 'repo groups', ie clusters of repositories linked by being mutual forks, would be fairly isolated for the whole git storage layer, and everything else feels pretty easily parallelisable (issues, actions, etc, modulo taking locks now and then to submit results or whatever). and given that, surely you can incrementally deploy changes across those many shards to avoid most big outages?

are there big conceptual serialisations that I've missed? is it just not well factored? was the move to Azure just a catastrophically bad idea? some other thing?

dist-epoch3• 3 months ago

recently there was a twit how GitHub PR diffs had 10 React components PER LINE. And how they optimized that to only 2 React components per line or something.

To summarize, for every v1 diff line there would be:
- Minimum of 10-15 DOM tree elements
- Minimum of 8-13 React Components
- Minimum of 20 React Event Handlers
- Lots of small re-usable React Components

https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/th...

bananapub2• 3 months ago

I'm asking about the infrastructure, obviously they chose for some reason to make my computer fans turn on to show some red and green lines on a text file.

fontain2• 3 months ago

Almost every high volume service on the internet is write a little, read a lot, and when there are writes, they're relatively small, a few bytes into a database that can fan out. GitHub is very different: constant writes, large files, it is under far more pressure than the systems the rest of us build. And then, as the article says, vibecoding happens, and suddenly they're receiving 30x the volume of expensive operations. GitHub are responsible for many of the performance improvements made to Git over the years, Git scales today because of work GitHub did, but that work was never intended to scale to volume of today.

Even as recently as 18 months ago, Lovable appeared, seemingly overnight, and caused huge problems for GitHub because they were creating repositories on GitHub for every single Lovable project, offloading the very high cost onto GitHub, hundreds of thousands of repositories. A couple of years before that, Homebrew used GitHub as a de facto CDN and that was a huge problem, too.

Nowadays it is easy to imagine how we can scale out a service like Twitter or YouTube or Facebook because everything has been done before, but that's not true of Git, Git hasn't ever scaled like this before, there are very few examples of service with GitHub's characteristics.

https://lovable.dev/blog/incident-github-outage

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659111

theojulienne• 3 months ago

I can't speak to the last few years since I left, but over the many years I was there the git storage layer was almost never the core issue - it was well designed by infrastructure-minded nerds that leveraged and improved git and replicated it really well across multiple nodes.

What always struggled was the richness of the Rails monolith itself and its backing MySQL databases - the expectation that everything links to everything throughout the product (think: issue cross references across orgs that only appear if you're able to access the remote repo, and other things like that).

Those details appear richly everywhere you look, and the combination of that with a general lack of understanding and/or focus on performance (shipping big features is hard, shipping them with performance at scale is MUCH harder), compounded by Ruby being an easy language to get performance wrong in (object count really hurts, and it makes it very easy to create many) leaves every feature adding to the performance problem, and makes it daunting/impossible to make fast once it's slow.

There was a full on year or more of making GitHub fast while I was there that just couldn't gain enough momentum to make enough of a dent to make it better. I remember finding and fixing a N^3 (or maybe it was N^4? something bad) in the home page activity feed - the worst thing I found but gives an idea. IMO it would need a fresh view of how to keep interfaces simple and how to design the data layers performantly - not adding every bell and whistle to every screen.

I hope someone at GitHub realises they are about to lose everything that was hard earned by early GitHub - it once was a site people (myself included) looked up to for ideal availability, responsible releases, data driven improvement - but no more it seems :(

torben-friis2• 3 months ago

Not enough attention is being put in the production/delivery mismatch.

GitHub is claiming they require 30x scale due to the giant increase in repository creation, PRs, commits, etc.

I have not seen a single product increase in features or quality as an end user, nor new significant products have come out in this period (other than the LLMs themselves).

Where is all this code going?

whstl• 3 months ago

I for one believe Microsoft when they say this code is going to Github... to die.

Half of my friends is vibe-coding something but they can barely get the rest of the group chat to use it once.

In companies, I see people vibe-coding "miracle apps" that fall under the smallest amount of scrutiny.

Basically people are doing the same developers do when they say "I can do this in a weekend", which is getting a prototype sort of running and then immediately losing energy (or in this case lacking ability) to push it forward.

jansan2• 3 months ago

Half of my friends is vibe-coding something but they can barely get the rest of the group chat to use it once.

Some people I know can't even explain what they are trying to create.

jamesfinlayson5• 3 months ago

Yeah I was talking to someone recently that needed some feature in a long-abandoned tool. They vibe-coded the feature and it worked, so good for them, but then they added up vibe-coding a bunch of extra features that they didn't need, just because.

jmbwell• 3 months ago

I understood it to mean, GitHub is being crushed by LLM/AI/Agentic code review and submission, not GitHub’s code itself

What I’m not seeing here but I am seeing with the Linux kernel is, most of the automatically submitted code is irrelevant or not useful

(Maybe that’s what you were getting at, apologies)

torben-friis2• 3 months ago

GitHub is being crushed by LLM/AI/Agentic code review and submission, not GitHub’s code itself

Yes, that was the intented meaning, sorry if it wasn't clear.

My point was that, if we can assume github's load is a decent proxy for global code generation, we're generating 30x without 30x results.

30x means that iOS could generate as many features as it has had since development in just a year. I don't think there is evidence of even 2x delivery in the industry.

yakattak• 3 months ago

To die. I’m sure that’s nothing new for GitHub, but now it can happen at scale.

LiamPowell• 3 months ago

I can not figure out what on Earth they've done with these graphs, it almost seems like these are an artists impression of a graph.

Looking at the commit graph: Why do commits have big steps followed by slow rolloffs? Why do the steps not happen at uniform points Why do larger steps sometimes have less of a slope than smaller steps but not all the time?

Then looking at the other graphs there's completely different effects going on.

jospeh554• 3 months ago

It's because they are your standard PowerPoint graph that just shows "thing goes up" rather than actual data, or the meaning of the data.

arnitdo• 3 months ago

They seem to be the result of an image-gen model to me

If this is the unvetted and unbased information they are putting out in public facing-blogs, only the stars would know what data is being "presented" in their boardrooms

himata4113• 3 months ago

so what they're saying is that Co-Authored-By claude@anthropic.com is overloading their systems?

and that azure cannot scale fast enough to handle the load so they're embracing multi-cloud as a company... owned by microsoft?

woah. what am I reading.

2ndorderthought2• 3 months ago

AI is the new DNS when it comes to service failure.

yieldcrv• 3 months ago

Ruby catching strays

Good chuckle out of this post, it’s crazy that neither Atlassian (Bitbucket) or Gitlab are capturing value out of this same agentic coding boom. I wish github was separately publicly traded outside of Microsoft.

Nowhere to get exposure to this

BlackFingolfin2• 3 months ago

GitHub stability has been bad for me. And recently even the data they show me in the web has been unreliably.

Since yesterday, me and several colleagues noticed that the pull request lists on the website are incomplete, across many repositories. For example, on https://github.com/gap-system/gap/pulls it says "Pull requests 78" in the "tab list", but the PR list view reports "35 open" (the number 78 is correct, and confirmed by e.g. `gh pr list`)

And that despite <https://www.githubstatus.com> reporting "all systems operational".

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

For example, on https://github.com/gap-system/gap/pulls it says "Pull requests 78" in the "tab list", but the PR list view reports "35 open" (the number 78 is correct, and confirmed by e.g. `gh pr list`)

Surely a scaling hack where they use "estimation" queries that return "kind of right" results instead of 100% correct data, as it's less load on the infrastructure. Not necessarily a bug as much a shit choice from product perspective.

BlackFingolfin2• 3 months ago

If the numbers were all that is wrong, that'd be OK. But it fails to list all data -- so the only way to navigate to the missing PRs is to know their number, and manually inserting the right URL (or to go to another PR, and then edit the URL in the navigation).

Sorry, but I don't think there is any way this can be classified as "not actually a bug"

matharmin• 3 months ago

In many of my projects don't show any closed pull requests for the last 6 days. The CLI can list them, but anything going through search shows nothing.

Their support acknowledged the issue, but has been silent since then, and the status page still shows nothing other than the potentially-related issue on the 27th. It looks like it has been resolved on some repositories in the meantime, but I still have the issue across multiple orgs and repositories.

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/193388

tracker12• 3 months ago

I'm not able to see the current release-please PR and the last one broke during release creation so aborted the deploy. Hoping today goes better, but limited expectations after yesterday and may be deploying manualy.

vinc• 3 months ago

I noticed the same thing and indeed the status page is not reporting the issue. I could find the missing PRs by browsing the branches page.

imrozim3• 3 months ago

As a solo dev GitHub going down is scary all my code, all my history, one platform. This makes me want to keep local backups more seriously.

2ndorderthought2• 3 months ago

Yea or use another provider like codeberg

imrozim3• 3 months ago

True but switching is not that easy when all your ci pipelines and integration on in GitHub.

maccard7• 3 months ago

Personally I'd never use codeberg. Their FAQ on licensing [0] is basically everything that anyone who supports free software should abhor - it's "we might allow you to do what you want to".

[0] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#how-about-pri...

tosti• 3 months ago

Sorry to ask but... Do you have any idea how git works???

sltr2• 3 months ago

One thing is clear: an LLM wrote this.

everfrustrated2• 3 months ago

So they haven't even finished migrating from their datacenters to Azure and have now started a project to add another cloud provider ("multi cloud")? Madness.

otar• 3 months ago

I had to postpone a call with developers (in 2 different countries) because I didn't had access to the issues board, which is a single source of truth for us.

I understand the rapid growth (because of AI agents), but if such critical software service becomes unstable then it's time to migrate? Thinking about self-hosting GitLab.

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

but if such critical software service becomes unstable then it's time to migrate?

Right way to think about this:

If things we need/see as critical for our work are hosted on a platform with really bad reliability, it's time for us to migrate

My internet connection at home is really shit, and almost every week there is a multi-hour downtime for some reason, not to mention when La Liga games are on TV anything using Cloudflare is unavailable, so I've had to spend extra energy and time to setup things in a way so I can still work whenever this happens.

throwatdem12311• 3 months ago

The main driver is a rapid change in how software is being built.

Leopard, meet face.

Too little too late, yesterday was the straw that broke the camel’s back for us and we’ve started a migration to a self-hosted GitLab.

lousken• 3 months ago

Availability is priority? Does not seem like it is https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

eolgun• 3 months ago

The AI agent growth explanation is interesting but also a bit of a deflection. If a meaningful portion of your traffic is now automated agents, your capacity planning model is fundamentally different, you're no longer scaling for human paced workflows but for burst patterns that look nothing like historical load.

The unlabeled graphs don't help the credibility case. When you are already in the hole on trust, shipping a post that requires readers to assume favorable baselines is exactly the wrong move.

jameskilton• 3 months ago

Nice, they have availability numbers now on their status page, but they aren't aggregating.

If you multiply all current numbers together (as of Apr 28), you find out that GitHub has a 97.26% uptime.

One ... single ... 9.

They can do better.

embedding-shape15• 3 months ago

Kind of unfair though, do the same for any platform with multiple services and you'd probably get <99% for most of them.

you find out that GitHub has a 97.26% uptime

Calculating that to "Downtime per day" you get ~40 minutes of downtime per day, almost a week per year. Crazy stuff for something essential like this.

Waterluvian• 3 months ago

I have a hard time believing anything what's said in a blog post where a graph lacks axes labels/scale. It tells me that nobody who cares about correctness had any say on the content of the post. Maybe I'm being 8am cranky and pedantic, but I'm sticking with it.

availability first, then capacity, then new features.

I'd love to experience first-hand a leadership team who says, "stop accepting new paying customers until we've got availability sorted out!"

madeofpalk2• 3 months ago

Like they did with Copilot last week? https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/changes-to-gi...

New sign-ups for GitHub Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans are paused. Pausing sign-ups allows us to serve existing customers more effectively.

GS_Projects• 3 months ago

The bit nobody covers in these write-ups: small teams without dual-cloud failover budget. Last big GitHub outage cost me a deploy day. Not catastrophic but the kind of thing you don't budget for when GitHub is your single source of truth.

Status page is also still doing that thing where every component is green but in practice clone is hanging, push is timing out, actions are stuck. Per-service uptime is a managed number. The user-experience number is the one that matters and it's not in the post-mortem.

AlexeyBelov• 3 months ago

No LLM comments.

dzonga• 3 months ago

blame MySQL. Blame Ruby.

on another note - is the exponential growth from 'agentic' workflows actually resulting in productive software in the wild. Or it is just noise. On my end I haven't seen the software I use getting better.

dangoodmanUT• 3 months ago

Two incidents? Just two?

In seriousness, looking at their scale, this is an insane engineering challenge.

Especially if they’re moving databases, not easy ever, and certainly not at that scale

mendyberger• 3 months ago

I wonder if this mess has anything to do with talent loss resulting from layoffs after the pandemic

pointlessone• 3 months ago

I’d guess it has much more to do with the extra load agentic ai generates. If we take the charts in the OP at face value, do you think gh suddenly exploded in popularity? At this point I think almost everyone who has any use for gh already has an account and use it as much as they ever would. But all the charts go to the moon. Gh obviously didn’t take into account that ai agents can generate a lot of activity they don’t have capacity for.

OutOfHere• 3 months ago

we accelerated parts of migrating performance or scale sensitive code out of Ruby monolith into Go.

I am surprised that Microsoft is allowed to use Go. How long will it be before a bean counter forces a rewrite to a Microsoft favored language?

senderista• 3 months ago

They used Go for the new TypeScript compiler!

agluszak• 3 months ago

Regarding their image with stats (https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/record-accell...) - what exactly are the ranges on y-axes? I doubt they had close to 0 PRs merged in 2023 ;)

000ooo000• 3 months ago

Load from paying customers vs. load from nonpaying users would be interesting to know. No doubt omitted deliberately.

clvx• 3 months ago

With this prioritization Github IPv6 support is gonna happen the next decade.

snihalani• 3 months ago

IPv6 doesn't sound like a huge lift at the entrypoints. Internal networking to IPv6 only sounds like an impossible lift

perbu• 3 months ago

fwiw, I've had good luck scaling git, specially doing clones, in the HTTP layer, using Varnish. this was CI bringing Github Enterprise to it's knees.

JimmaDaRustla• 3 months ago

AS IF THEY POST THIS WHILE THEIR SEARCH IS BROKEN, what a circus

pier25• 3 months ago

Github has been having availability issues for years now.

TuxPowered• 3 months ago

The availability of GitHub is still at 0% - it can't be reached over IPv6.

zinodaur• 3 months ago

posts graphs without way to determine scale of y axis

Now that’s the kind of excellence I expect from the GitHub engineering team

BigTTYGothGF• 3 months ago

LLMs and vibe coding ruining it for the rest of us.

devmor• 3 months ago

Microsoft has been an abysmal steward of Github - the few nice features it has over self-hosting just aren't worth losing an hour or more of CI/CD downtime during daylight hours every week.

Yesterday was the last straw for me - I've begun migrating my personal private projects and my contracting firm's projects off of github.

mrhottakes• 3 months ago

LLMs have helped us invent websites that only work sometimes. We're truly living in the future.

zamalek4• 3 months ago

Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features.

No mention of Copilot/slopiffication. Probably an intentional omission as Microsoft only has one true priority across all of its products.

saghm2• 3 months ago

Given what "An Update on <XYZ>" usually means, I can only assume this means that Github has decided to no longer provide availability. Not particularly surprising given current trends I guess

dangus3• 3 months ago

Notice how the graphs have no Y axis. That's how you know it's manipulative.

This company is owned by one of the major causes of the AI boom and is hiding behind difficulty scaling, despite its parent company also being a premier source of scaling solutions.

GitHub: don't gaslight your customers.

It is not your customers' problem that you're having trouble scaling. Nobody cares. Give us the service we are paying you for and make it reliable, or else we'll choose something else.

After the words "Both of those incidents are not acceptable" the blog post should have been over. Nobody needs to hear a sob story about how your service is too popular.

danra• 3 months ago

When it's down to brass tacks, the most common GitHub action, actions/checkout, is not taking contributions due to "focus [...] on strategic areas" [0] despite having years-old issues - here's one[1] that soon celebrates its sixth birthday, despite having an available PR!

[0] https://github.com/actions/checkout#note

[1] https://github.com/actions/checkout/issues/270#issue-6289677...

bartread• 3 months ago

I wanted to give an update on GitHub’s availability in light of two recent incidents.

[Emphasis mine]

Vlad, you are living in a very different world to me.

GitHub has suffered dozens and dozens of outages since the beginning of the year. It is notably less available and reliable than it was even as recently as last year. People have created dashboards and heatmaps showing how bad GitHub has become. At least one of those has made it to the front page of Hacker News. In fact its unreliability and persistent availability issues have become a frequent topic of conversation across sites and communities frequented its users - of which HN and Reddit are two obvious examples. At this point GitHub's unreliability risks becoming a meme, if it hasn't already done so.

The only thing your post makes clear is that your priorities ARE NOT clear.

Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features.

WRONG!

Your priorities are:

1. Availability 2. Availability 3. Availability

You have NO OTHER PRIORITIES.

If you want other priorities, focus on AVAILABILITY for 6 months and then come back and we can all have a serious conversation about something else.

In the meantime, you need to understand that GitHub's reliability over months and months - not just in April - has been completely unacceptable.

Focus on fixing that and on nothing else.

dminik• 3 months ago

I've recently built a script that periodically (every 25 minutes) fetches the latest merged PRs to check for some potential rule violations. I'm not an admin and couldn't get the events API working, so I just resorted to polling.

On an average ~8 hour working day, there's at least one failed request. In fact, looking over the logs, I can't spot a single day that did not have a failed request.

Now, I can't guarantee that these are all caused by GitHub (as opposed to my connection), but it is pretty funny.

dude2507112• 3 months ago

Microsoft board and shareholders: "LOL, nah! More vibe coding inside and outside plz".

baobun• 3 months ago

Wow.

Security or trust not even making the list.

gamerslexus• 3 months ago

The main driver is a rapid change in how software is being built. Since the second half of December 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply.

So, it's because of LLMs guys.

russellthehippo• 3 months ago

Reading the capacity crunch idea made me a little more empathetic to their issues - 30x in one year is a lot when you're starting from a high baseline. Now that being said...I'd really appreciate more availability.

mw888• 3 months ago

Their ostensible troubles are fueled by "exponential usage growth", demonstrated by three graphs which exclude axis labels and are aggressively cropped.

twobitshifter• 3 months ago

let’s do git without github again

init_31• 3 months ago

GitHub wants everyone to use AI agents but if you try to register a new account today you are greeted by an endless gauntlet of absolutely ridiculous captchas that reject you because they think you're an AI agent and nobody should be using AI agents on GitHub.

chanux• 3 months ago

I have a feeling that this post is good enough reassurance for big money corps.

Long live Github under MS!

JackSlateur• 3 months ago

I do not understand how github can still have issues ..

I mean: obviously, in the old world, it would have taken lot of work to improve the situation. But now, with AI, just plug copilot against the code base and everything is fixed in a week, no ?

An update on GitHub availability

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