alt Hacker NewsGitHub's Historic Uptime
Comments
Even better IMO is this status page: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
"The Missing GitHub Status Page" with overall aggregate percentages. Currently at 90.84% over the last 90 days. It was at 90.00% a couple days ago.
It’s biaised to show this without the dates at which features were introduced. A lot of the downtimes in the breakdown are GitHub Actions, which launched in August 2019; so yeah what a surprise there was no Actions downtime before because Actions didn’t exist.
Based on the graphics, Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing very well
I got Claude to make me the exact same graph a few weeks ago! I had hypothesized that we'd see a sharp drop off, instead what I found (as this project also shows) is a rather messy average trend of outages that has been going on for some time.
The graph being all nice before the Microsoft acquisition is a fun narrative, until you realize that some products (like actions, announced on October 16th, 2018) didn't exist and therefore had no outages. Easy to correct for by setting up start dates, but not done here. For the rest that did exist (API requests, Git ops, pages, etc) I figured they could just as easily be explained with GitHub improving their observability.
FWIW if people are looking for a reason why, here's why I think it's happening: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
PR merging broken right now https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/ml7wplmxbt5l
My impression is that, before Microsoft acquired GitHub, GitHub went for many years without really introducing new features, so part of its stability came from the fact that it wasn’t very ambitious or proactive about improving.
I remember a lot of unicorn pages back in the days. Maybe the status page was just not updated that regularly back then?
I feel like by now GitHub has a worse downtime record than my self hosted services on my single server where I frequently experiment, stop services or reboot.
I'd like to move off GitHub, and I deploy some websites using GitHub Pages, so I took a look at the availability of static web hosting; GH actually does really well on this metric, although Fastly, the CDN they use, should get the credit.
Github's migration to Azure has so far been a hilariously bad advertisement for Azure
I'm not a GitHub apologist, but that graph isn't at scale, at all. It's massively zoomed in, with a lower band of 99.5%. It makes it look far worse than it is.
Unsolicited feedback ... changing the y-axis to be hours (not % uptime) might be more intuitive for folks to understand.
The data is there, you just have to hover over each data point.
The biggest spikes are Github Actions, starting November 2019. They didn't go GA until November 13, 2019: https://siliconangle.com/2019/11/13/github-universe-announce...
I'm convinced one of my org's repos is just haunted now. It doesn't matter what the status page says. I'll get a unicorn about twice a day. Once you have 8000 commits, 15k issues, and two competing project boards, things seem to get pretty bad. Fresh repos run crazy fast by comparison.
Nearly every time Github has an outage, Azure is having issues also.
Actually the last 4-5 outages from Github, Our Azure environments have issues (that they rarely post on the status page) and lo and behold I'll notice that Github is also having the same problem.
I can only assume most of this is from the Azure migration path. Such an abysmal platform to be on. I loathe it.
Looks like there's an internal service health bulletin:
Impact Statement: Starting at 19:53 UTC on 31 Mar 2026, some customers using the Key Vault service in the East US region may experience issues accessing Key Vaults. This may directly impact performing operations on the control plane or data plane for Key Vault or for supported scenarios where Key Vault is integrated with other Azure services.
Honestly all of the key vault functions are offline for us in that region. Just another day in paradise.
Also the fact that the azure status page remains green is normal. Just assume it's statically green unless enough people notice.
It could also be that they have more customers / clients now, or offer more capabilities.
Do we have metrics for the uptime of other major services? Would be interesting to see if this is just a GitHub problem or industry-wide.
It’s actually great to see a living example of how sensitive users* are to what to a lay person would look like a small amount of downtime.
The fact that we’re all talking about it, and not at all surprised, is a great example we can take when making the case for more 9’s of reliability.
* well, very technical power users.
How much of the downtime is due to all the AI code being committed?
It is ridiculous how company owned by Microsoft, making non sense money on Azure, is let to die like this. That's have to be a soft of plan or something. So sad to watch it.
This at least makes me feel like I am not going crazy when I say "Github used to be much more reliable before Microsoft bought them"
The significance of the changeover would be much more impactful if the chart showed a longer history.
GitHub is 100x the size today with 100x the product surface area. Pre-Microsoft GitHub was just a git host. Now, whether GitHub should have become what it is today is a fair question but to say “GitHub” is less stable today vs. 10 years ago ignores the significant changes. Also, much of these incidents are limited to products that are unreliable by nature, e.g: CoPilot depends on OpenAI and OpenAI has outages. The entire LLM API industry expects some requests to fail.
GitHub’s reliability could stand to be improved but without narrowing down to products these sort of comparisons are meaningless.
Honestly I think their status page just got more honest -- and they are graphing this in such a way that any partial outage to any service looks really bad on teh chart.
There were definitely partial outages to services inside that row of horizontal green dots, that the status page just wasn't advertising.
I think you mean GitHub’s histrionic uptime.
I mean I'm as annoyed as the next person about the outages but I'm not sure correlating with the Microsoft acquisition tells the whole story? GitHub usage has been growing massively I'd imagine?
Programming is a solved problem, btw.
I wonder if they got moved to Azure in 2019?
I will chime in that Jira and Bitbucket have drastically improved performance and reliability over this same time period. It actually feels snappy and they seem to listen to feedback.
When I say that Microsoft writes very bad code some people get offended. For example for Azure Event Hubs they have almost no documentation and Java libraries that mostly do not run.
That's pretty stark.
hot take: I would accept ads under every PR comment in GitHub if we could get back to 3 or 4 nines of reliability.
I guess "centralizing everything" to GitHub was never a good idea and called it 6 years ago. [0]
Looking at this now, you might as well self host and you would still get better uptime than GitHub.
[dead]
interesting to see the correlation between outages and major feature launches — the big ones almost always coincide with infrastructure changes rather than random failures. Would be curious to overlay this with GitHub's engineering blog posts about what was happening behind the scenes.
Nearly all the variance is from Actions, a product that didn’t exist beforehand.
It’s despicable to see everyone punching down on GitHub. Even under Microsoft they’ve continued to provide an invaluable and free service to open source developers .
And now , while vibe coders smother them to death, we ridicule them . Shameful , really
Is the pre-2018 data actually accurate? There seem to have been a number of outages before then: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&...
Maybe that's just the date when they started tracking uptime using this sytem?