alt Hacker NewsThat pink "Unicorn!" joke is something that should be reconsidered. When your services are down you're probably causing a lot of people a lot of stress ; I don't think it's the time to be cute and funny about it.
EDIT: my bad, seems to be their server's name.
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I don't think it's a joke, it's the server that github runs on
One of Reddit's cutesy error pages (presumably for Internal Server Error is similar) is an illustration that says "You broke reddit". I know it's a joke, but have wondered what effect that might have on a particularly anxiety-prone person who takes it literally and thinks they've done something that's taken the site down and inconvenienced millions of other people. Seems a bit dodgy for a mainstream site to assume all of its users have the dev knowledge to identify a joking accusation.
Even if it is their server name, I completely agree with your point. The image is not appropriate when your multi-billion revenue service is yet again failing to meet even a basic level of reliability, preventing people from doing their jobs and generally causing stress and bad feeling all round.
I am personally totally fine with it but I see your point. Github is a bit too big for often braking with a cutsey error message even if it is a reference to their web server.
That stupid "Aww, Snap!" message I think it's one of the browsers does.
I don't know if it's meant to be a joke, per se. They use (or used) the Unicorn server once upon a time:
https://github.blog/news-insights/unicorn/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4957986