alt Hacker NewsGitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?
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I’ve reached the point where I just feel a mourning kind of sadness for GitHub
It's not making headlines, but Google and Apple seem to be getting hammered by AI as well. Getting app updates approved to release on prod on Play Store / App store used to take days, now it's taking weeks.
Given that the outages are caused by record traffic, so far they are only cooked in the Yogi Berra sense of “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”
Near the end of the 8.5 years that I worked at GitHub as an enterprise support engineer, I asked in an all hands if a "GitHub Classic" product had been considered. Much like World of Warcraft Classic, I imagined it would be a rewrite focused on matching the simpler feature set of the past.
I was basically given the same response that blizzard gave that question; "you think you want that but you don't".
> "GitHub has had 1125 incidents since February 2016, implying a monthly incident rate of 24"
1125 incidents / 126 months ≈ 8.9 incidents per month, not 24
still terrible, but why such an obvious error in the first sentence...
I feel for the team having to deal with these problems at github today. Its also beyond me how those in charge for years wouldn't have seen this coming.
Github was bought by Microsoft, whether they wanted to acknowledge that internally or not. Microsoft went deep on LLMs, and specifically on LLMs for coding use cases. They must have recognized that LLM generated code and PRs would effectively DDoS GitHub.
I can only assume they simply didn't care, likely driven by greed.
Is GitHub Cooked? Decidedly yes.
Migrating to something else has been raised as a concern during every engagement with clients and prospective clients in the past year.
"Do you use GitHub?"
"Yes though we'd like to move to something else, we just don't know what yet."
As soon as the next big thing shows up, they're done. And they know it.
could have been a page with a static 'Yes' and a significant portion of time it'd be accurate.
Didn't GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov just posted this a couple days ago?
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17...
If backend GitHub services are anything like GHES then I’m surprised it even managed to scale this much.
Getting rid of Actions and Copilot and other secondary services almost halves Github's incident rate: https://i.imgur.com/XPcMIFr.png
I'm a big fan of Github Actions and I think people are often a little too harsh on it, but it's clear that it's sad that it's come at such a high cost to the platform's stability
It’s ironic that the SCM that 2026 software engineers landed on, is one with a complicated distributed usage model and is slow/down because of a centralised service
Yes, but I did not need to look at the tracker to know that.....
I literally chuckled out loud when I saw the headline :D
An important thing to consider is how much of their uptime without incidents is not the normal working hours. Their incident-free uptime on 9-5 EST, Mon-Fri, is probably like 60%.
Oh, I thought it said "Github Outrage Tracker".
I was ready to click...
They were cooked the moment they got acquired by Microsoft.
This is why I foresaw that centralizing everything to GitHub was just generally a bad idea 6 years ago. [0]
Now that there is no CEO of GitHub, there is no point to GitHub improving.
I think we need to have a little more sympathy for GitHub. You could justify the jabs when we could all blame any outage on the migration to Azure, but then they shared numbers around the scale they're dealing with now that everyone is constantly building and pushing with AI.
I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers. Yes, they need to get this figured out, but a little sympathy goes a long way. I personally wish them the best and hope their on-call people can go back to getting normal amounts of sleep soon.