An alternate interpretation of that chart is "After the microsoft acquisition, they got serious about actually tracking outages."
That said, anecdotally, it's felt much worse over the last 6 months. I'd guess it's a combination of MS-induced quality drops and AI-induced scale increases.
Well, perhaps not as long ago (e. g. from the acquisition), but if you look at the last four weeks or so, just that part alone, you can clearly see that something is not working here. Microsoft is constantly mentioned on Hacker News and not typically in a great, praising light.
And when they introduced "Free" for everyone including teams, well I tried to warn everyone that centralizing everything to GitHub was not a good idea [0] 6 years ago.
For the record, it's failing silently, too, showing e.g. "There aren’t any open pull requests." even though there are dozens. That's pretty bad, this will definitely mislead people.
I was surprised that incident didn’t seem to get as much attention since that was a pretty major data corruption bug, but I guess it was a much smaller scope of impacted repos/customers than a lot of these availability issues?
Wow, this taking unusually long to fix. I suppose the team trying to fix it hit the Claude session limits and now can't do anything until the end of the cooldown and the only person who knows how to fix it without AI is out for a surgery. When the entire generation of people who knew how to fix shit without using AI will retire, what happens then?
Reminder to all OSS projects: it is extraordinarily easy to setup a simple CI job to keep your code in sync between multiple Forges. And getting email notifications from a second Forge is 0 extra effort.
At least give people the option to start moving away from GitHub to contribute to your project. It will, ultimately, be better for the ecosystem.
Yeah I think I've finally had enough. I need to start seriously advocating for alternatives since this is starting to impact our business. It's clearly not getting any better.
If you want a GitHub-like UI (with org/repo structure limitations) use either Forgejo or Gitea.
If you want a similar but different experience use GitLab.
If you want something more akin to the kernel experience (i.e. hosting, flexible repository structure, user auth via ssh keys, and a simple web UI) use gitolite with cgit, or alternatively gitweb.
I mean, technically it's a code review platform, not a complete toolbox like Gitlab and co, but damn if it isn't the most professional feeling experience.
Go ahead. We've been self-hosting Gitea with Drone/Woodpecker for years; either it or Forgejo will do fine if you're okay with their feature set. I sometimes wander into these GitHub threads to have a laugh; our Gitea instance has had several minutes of downtime combined over the last few years, all of them planned (to upgrade Gitea) and in the middle of the night.
If you need to self-host, self-host. Sourcehut is obviously not a replacement for that.
But, if not: It is different because Drew DeVault is scathingly anti-AI, and has a history of sticking to strong opinions (for better or worse). Seems like the best bet for off-premise source control if you are concerned about AI scraping and downtime.
Yeah, collaboration usually requires some sort of centralisation. Whether that is the LKML+git.kernel.org, gitlab.gnome.org, salsa.debian.org or Sourcehut, or GitHub. At least Sourcehut isn't completely proprietary and shoving AI down your throat at every possible chance. The same can be said for Codeberg and almost any GitLab CE, Gitea or Forgejo instance
Been noticing this all day.. various workflows failing in weird ways.. strange UI issues... Literally holding off on our deployment for a day... bad enough it seems like I'm fixing a CI/CD breakage once a month or more.
An increasingly disturbing trend from Github and I only see this getting worse.
I wouldn't rule out them moving away from offering the free tier to stop the all the code pushes. I think new code mostly written by AI isn't that appealing of a data set to train on.
It's crazy that the systems the best designed for decentralization like git, email, and the internet itself wound up being the most centralized with single points of failure.
I am once again here to say that my gitea has better uptime since I deployed it. It's way snappier too. Long live self-hosting. Diversify from the cloud, build your own!
Another happy self hosted Gitea user here for ~3 years now.
Came from Gitlab which started pushing out basic users in 2022 with massive price hikes. I weighed Github as an option but was like "no I don't want to be dealing with this same problem in another 5 years" when some other rug pull or degradation happens with that service. So I'm feeling pretty validated for that decision these days.
The speed improvement was massive (super low latency), and was worth the switch on it's own, but we also saved 90% in immediate cost... probably more in secondary effects from the git host just not being a pain point. The only long or unplanned downtime we've had was 2 hours in that whole 3 years where the tiny Linode VPS host had a total hardware failure and got migrated, which is a pretty damn good number of 9s for a simple easy to host single server solution. We also gained more durable and fast offsite backups (zfs) that Gitlab could never offer, but that's more of a custom self hosted thing not specific to Gitea.
My new projects do not use GitHub, and will not use GitHub as anything more than a mirror. Two nines of reliability isn't enough for devtools.
GitHub is in a tight space right now. The pace of software development is increasing and they are in a load-bearing position. In addition, their GitHub Copilot license was a massive loss-leader both directly costing them money, and making the traffic problem even worse. Simply put, they aren't prioritizing scaling and reliability like they need to be in this current situation and instead are focusing on feature build outs that boil down to being Microsoft's AI Middleman Salesperson.
Their position is hard, but they are potentially fumbling the ball in a big way. I for one don't trust them to not be down right before I want to do a production deploy.
Oh, it's even more fun than that. If you sit there hitting F5, sooner or later you will get a proper page load. So some small subset of the servers is vending the correct data, and the rest not
Pr's don't load, issues don't load. Pretty much unusable for dev workflows. I felt like a lot of the hand wringing over GH reliability was a bit dramatic but this one seems pretty major (at least for me) and doesn't seem to even be getting that much coverage.
I think we have given GitHub enough time (more than half a decade) after Microsoft acquired it to sort itself out.
It is now being run into the ground.
At this point their chatbots Tay.ai, Zo, and Copilot are wrecking the platform and there is no CEO of GitHub to complain to about this so it now makes no sense to use GitHub at all. (Especially GitHub Actions)
It is now time to self host and not "centralize everything to GitHub". [0]
It's now safe to say just don't use GitHub. There are other free hosted and self hosted solutions. The less we use this crap product, the less front page noise we'll get =)
https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
I don't think that chart shows what it seems like it shows. There were plenty of pre-2018 outages that don't show up there: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&...
An alternate interpretation of that chart is "After the microsoft acquisition, they got serious about actually tracking outages."
That said, anecdotally, it's felt much worse over the last 6 months. I'd guess it's a combination of MS-induced quality drops and AI-induced scale increases.
It’s astonishing how bad their software is now. I guess 20 years of outsourcing and bean-counting will do that
But in the past year or so, it does feel like outages are becoming commonplace.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
It’s also massively more performant
https://trunk.io/merge-queue
At least give people the option to start moving away from GitHub to contribute to your project. It will, ultimately, be better for the ecosystem.
The difficult part is all what's around the code:
* the tickets/PR (including the closed ones)
* the links referencing the project
* the CI setup
* for large projects, the committers permission setup
* if applicable, the push/commit/branch rules
All that will be deeply annoying to migrate on a per project basis, or might get lost.
But that's not even the worst on my opinion. Losing the go-to platform for finding software is (fediverse for software when?).
If you want a similar but different experience use GitLab.
If you want something more akin to the kernel experience (i.e. hosting, flexible repository structure, user auth via ssh keys, and a simple web UI) use gitolite with cgit, or alternatively gitweb.
I mean, technically it's a code review platform, not a complete toolbox like Gitlab and co, but damn if it isn't the most professional feeling experience.
Same for Forgejo.
https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg
https://social.anoxinon.de/@codebergstatus/11647770704799298...
But, if not: It is different because Drew DeVault is scathingly anti-AI, and has a history of sticking to strong opinions (for better or worse). Seems like the best bet for off-premise source control if you are concerned about AI scraping and downtime.
Yeah, collaboration usually requires some sort of centralisation. Whether that is the LKML+git.kernel.org, gitlab.gnome.org, salsa.debian.org or Sourcehut, or GitHub. At least Sourcehut isn't completely proprietary and shoving AI down your throat at every possible chance. The same can be said for Codeberg and almost any GitLab CE, Gitea or Forgejo instance
https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
I wouldn't rule out them moving away from offering the free tier to stop the all the code pushes. I think new code mostly written by AI isn't that appealing of a data set to train on.
"intermittent" is kind of underselling a failure on ~9/10 page loads
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173
I don't trust Microsoft's status page. It might be "fine" over all but it definitely is not fine for me.
Came from Gitlab which started pushing out basic users in 2022 with massive price hikes. I weighed Github as an option but was like "no I don't want to be dealing with this same problem in another 5 years" when some other rug pull or degradation happens with that service. So I'm feeling pretty validated for that decision these days.
The speed improvement was massive (super low latency), and was worth the switch on it's own, but we also saved 90% in immediate cost... probably more in secondary effects from the git host just not being a pain point. The only long or unplanned downtime we've had was 2 hours in that whole 3 years where the tiny Linode VPS host had a total hardware failure and got migrated, which is a pretty damn good number of 9s for a simple easy to host single server solution. We also gained more durable and fast offsite backups (zfs) that Gitlab could never offer, but that's more of a custom self hosted thing not specific to Gitea.
GitHub is in a tight space right now. The pace of software development is increasing and they are in a load-bearing position. In addition, their GitHub Copilot license was a massive loss-leader both directly costing them money, and making the traffic problem even worse. Simply put, they aren't prioritizing scaling and reliability like they need to be in this current situation and instead are focusing on feature build outs that boil down to being Microsoft's AI Middleman Salesperson.
Their position is hard, but they are potentially fumbling the ball in a big way. I for one don't trust them to not be down right before I want to do a production deploy.
The Empire may fall ...
It is now being run into the ground.
At this point their chatbots Tay.ai, Zo, and Copilot are wrecking the platform and there is no CEO of GitHub to complain to about this so it now makes no sense to use GitHub at all. (Especially GitHub Actions)
It is now time to self host and not "centralize everything to GitHub". [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803