The graph in TFA shows the downtime pattern starting in January 2020. OpenAI released GPT-3.5 in November 2022 (basically December), and LLM/agentic coding didn’t really kick off in the way you’re describing until 2024, but really in 2025.

How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?

Yeah, I had the exact same response after reading the post. I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room. Let's say the _perfect_ GitHub replacement spawns tomorrow? What's preventing the same infrastructure challenges of millions of lines of AI-generated code destroying it?

I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.

GitHub hasn't changed in any positive way since the acquisition. A decade is a long time, it tells.

GitHub action, co pilot. Oh and that ugly AI search I'm unable to disable. Migration to azure.

Yes Microsoft managed to ruin the network effect. Outages? The straw that broke the camel's back.

I like to think that Microsoft is trying to run GitHub in Windows in their Azure cloud. And on the fact that every time GitHub is down I think of "someone updated the Windows Servers GH runs on and had to reboot everything".

While I'm 99% sure it is not true, it makes me sleep better at night. And giggle a little when it goes down.

A big part of the problem IS Microsoft acquisition. They forced them to move to Azure, which is terrible.

Around 8 years ago I was working for a company that they also acquired, and they also forced us to move to Azure. Performance was terrible and our system wasn’t just working there as it should. A few years later our service was dead and all customers moved to one of their office products.

Even if this is true: Microsoft own an entire cloud platform. They have enormous codebases of their own and they employ ~200k people. It’s just not an excuse, especially because they consciously made decisions such as e.g. private repositories being free

10x the code? Easy solution. Throttle unpaid customers or put a quota.

Either way, paid customers should not be affected.

If that's the case, we should also see the exact same pattern on Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. Do we?

Why have they not simply asked the 800lb gorilla to solve this problem for them?

Don't you think Microsoft ought to have thought a bit more about scale? They're not just innocent bystanders here. GitHub Copilot is a first class citizen of GitHub and so of course a lot of private enterprises are going to be using the thing that's bundled with the other thing.

For upstarts, individuals, artists and idealists, Github was a means to reach and distribute code reliably to a large number of people on the planet. Is that true today? Will it ever?

97% of code coming in is AI slop. It's owned by an evil, rent seeking corp. Reliability is a flaming dumpster fire. And everything you commit there will be used to train more AI.

Github _is_ sinking.

Yes, I posted the same observation 3 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877226

"Yes, it (AI) will kill open source—at least as we know it. I’m convinced that GitHub and GitLab will eventually stop offering their services for free if the flood of low-quality, "vibe-coded" projects—complete with lengthy but shallow documentation—continues to grow at the current rate."

Gergely's newsletter claims its more like 2.3x.

MS isn't solely to blame for the AI increase, but they are certainly part of the problem, including their integration of copilot into Github.

I’m with you here. Further: Even though I disagree with it, “GitHub down, Microsoft bad” is a defensible take, but we’ve seen it ad nauseam at this point.

This would make sense if GitHub themselves cited increased traffic or load shedding as their root cause, but most of their incidents from the last month seems to cite misconfigured infrastructure or operational mistakes.

The author mentions this and links an article that expands on it

The 800 pound gorilla in the room being a $3T company that also happens to be one of the largest cloud providers?

C'mon.

If load has increased so much so rapidly then GitHub should be rate limiting as needed instead of basically letting people DoS them.

Github had lots of outages even before AI was introduced.

And why is it wrong? The logic is there:

- Microsoft committed to AI. - AI slop is increasing the costs for maintaining/running GitHub. - GitHub is sinking.

This is interconnected. I can think of numerous other ways how this would be handled. But Microsoft went the AI slop way already. There is no way back for them.

We want to thank you for your heroic service in our defense, sir. We really need people like you who know in what side they're at.

Microsoft investors