alt Hacker NewsGitHub Is Down
Comments
Of course they're down while I'm trying to address a "High severity" security bug in Caddy but all I'm getting is a unicorn when loading the report.
(Actually there's 3 I'm currently working, but 2 are patched already, still closing the feedback loop though.)
I have a 2-hour window right now that is toddler free. I'm worried that the outage will delay the feedback loop with the reporter(s) into tomorrow and ultimately delay the patches.
I can't complain though -- GitHub sustains most of my livelihood so I can provide for my family through its Sponsors program, and I'm not a paying customer. (And yet, paying would not prevent the outage.) Overall I'm very grateful for GitHub.
GitHub has had customer visible incidents large enough to warrant status page updates almost every day this year (https://www.githubstatus.com/history).
This should not be normal for any service, even at GitHub's size. There's a joke that your workday usually stops around 4pm, because that's when GitHub Actions goes down every day.
I wish someone inside the house cared to comment why the services barely stay up and what kinds of actions are they planning to do to fix this issue that's been going on years, but has definitely accelerated in the past year or so.
Looks like AI replacement of engineering force in action.
On the plus side, it's git, so developers can at least get back to work without too much hassle as long as they don't need the CI/CD side of things immediately.
Screw GitHub, seriously. This unreliability is not acceptable. If I’m in a position where I can influence what code forge we use in future I will do everything in my power to steer away from GitHub.
They're overwhelmed with all the vibecoded apps people are pushing after watching the Super Bowl.
Sorry, my fault. I tried to download a couple of CppCon presentations from their stash. Should have known better than to touch anything C++. ducks
pretty clear that companies like microsoft are actually terrible at engineering, their core products were built 30 years ago. any changes now are generally extremely incremental and quickly rolled back with issue. trying to innovate at github shows just how bad they are.
Seems like MS copilot is vibe-ing it again ! Some other major cloud provider outages come to mind that never happened before the "vibe" area.
The biggest thing tying my team to GitHub right now is that we use Graphite to manage stacked diffs, and as far as I can tell, Graphite doesn't support anything but GitHub. What other tools are people using for stacked-diff workflows (especially code review)?
Gerrit is the other option I'm aware of but it seems like it might require significant work to administer.
They put too much AI in it bot enough engineering rigor
Is it really that much better than alternatives to justify these constant outages?
I wonder what's the value of having a dedicated X (formerly Twitter) status account post 2023 when people without account will see a mix of entries from 2018, 2024, and 2020 in no particular order upon opening it. Is it just there so everyone can quickly share their post announcing they're back?
Oh! It's not my GitLab@Hetzner that's not working, it's GitHub. Just when I decided to opensource my project.
Looks like they've got a status page up now for PRs, separate from the earlier notifications one: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/smf24rvl67v9
Edit: Now acknowledging issues across GitHub as a whole, not just PRs.
It feels like GitHub's shift to these "AI writes code for you while you sleep!" features will appeal to a less technical crowd who lack awareness of the overall source code hosting and CI ecosystem and, combined with their operational incompetence of late (calling it how I see it), will see their dominance as the default source code solution for folks using it to maintain production software projects fade away.
Hopefully the hobbyists are willing to shell out for tokens as much as they expect.
It's a funny coincidence - I pushed a commit adding a link to an image in the README.md, opened the repo page, clicked on the said image, and got the unicorn page. The site did not load anymore after that.
List of company-friendly managed-host alternatives? SSO, auditing, user management, billing controls, etc?
I would love to pay Codeberg for managed hosting + support. GitLab is an ugly overcomplicated behemoth... Gitea offers "enterprise" plans but do they have all the needed corporate features? Bitbucket is a joke, never going back to that.
to be fair, i think usage has increased a lot because of coding agents and some things that worked well for now can't scale to the next 10x level.
Just remove all that copilot nonsense and focus on uptime... I would like to push some code.
The saddest part to me is that their status update page and twitter are both out of date. I get a full 500 on github.com and yet all I see on their status page is an "incident with pull requests" and "copilot policy propagation delays."
Well its a day that ends in Y.
Github is down so often now, especially actions, I am not sure how so many companies are still relying on them.
I don't know if it's related, but for the past week I've been getting pages cut off at some point, as if something closed the connection mid-transfer.
Today, when I was trying to see the contribution timeline of one project, it didn't render.
Anyone have alternatives to recommend? We will be switching after this. Already moved to self-hosted action runners and we are early-stage so switching cost is fairly low.
the incident has now expanded to include webhooks, git operations, actions, general page load + API requests, issues, and pull requests. they're effectively down hard.
hopefully its down all day. we need more incidents like this to happen for people to get a glimpse of the future.
We replaced everything except the git part because of reliability issues. Pages…gone Actions…gone KB…gone. Tickets…gone.
Maybe they need to get more humans involved because GitHub is down at least once a week for a while now.
Damn, I was also trying to push and deploy a critical bug fix that was needed within minutes.
I bet Microsoft did this...
sorry all, i took a month off and then opened github.com
1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.
Microslop strikes again!
I look forward to the day that jjhub becomes available...
Has anyone noticed that in the past year we have seen a LOT of outages?
Do they publish proper post-mortems? I feel like that's gotta be the bare minimum nowadays for such critical digital infrastructure.
The new-fangled copilot/agentic stuff I do read about on HN is meaningless to me if the core competency is lost here.
GitHub is the new Internet Explorer 6. A Microsoft product so dominant in its category that it's going to hold everyone back for years to come.
Just when open source development has to deal with the biggest shift in years and maintainers need a tool that will help them fight the AI slop and maintain the software quality, GitHub not only can't keep up with the new requirements, they struggle to keep their product running reliably.
Paying customers will start moving off to GitLab and other alternatives, but GitHub is so dominant in open source that maintainers won't move anywhere, they'll just keep burning out more than before.
Github's two biggest selling points were its feature set (Pull Requests, Actions) and its reliability.
With the latter no longer a thing, and with so many other people building on Github's innovations, I'm starting to seriously consider alternatives. Not something I would have said in the past, but when Github's outages start to seriously affect my ability to do my own work, I can no longer justify continuing to use them.
Github needs to get its shit together. You can draw a pretty clear line between Microsoft deciding it was all in on AI and the decline in Github's service quality. So I would argue that for Github to gets its shit back together, it needs to ditch the AI and focus on high quality engineering.
> Monday
Beyond a meme at this point
Maybe we should post when it's up
GitHub has a long history of being extremely unstable. They were down all the time, much like recently, several years ago. They seemed to stabilize quite a bit around the MS acquisition era, and now seem to be returning to their old instability patterns.
it's Monday therefore Github is down.
Copilot, what have you done again?
presumably slophub's now dogfooding GitHub Agentic Workflows?
If you'd have asked me a few years ago if anything could be an existential threat to github's dominance in the tech community I'd have quickly said no.
If they don't get their ops house in order, this will go down as an all-time own goal in our industry.