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Discussion (471 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
In my eyes it would be a ginormous gain to our colective mental health to not have the expectation to contribute to open source projects for free, or to have "green squares" every day on a public GitHub profile.
Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.
And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).
Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.
On the contrary, I believe it's been detrimental to the open internet and only serves to control us by the powerful.
I never trusted Github and never will.
Even if the platform itself doesn't take off, the protocol and the data ownwership (you host your repo artifacts, issues, prs, etc on your ATproto server) mean that a competitor could come in easily if you were no longer satisfied with performance, reliability, or monetization.
This is the way. Stop centralizing everything.
It's a social network with github-like social features and git hosting, but you can still self host your git and have all the features like issues, PRs and so on just like GitHub.
And it's built on ATProto so you can also have your issues PRs and so on hosted on your infra, but everything interconnects nicely with your single account, just like using GitHub.
They even added a vouching system for users, to know who to trust based on who you already trusted.
I suppose people can use git too if they ever figure out how to send emails from a dedicated client.
If I build something that satisfies me and say 100 users (who all star me) does that really say anything. Are those 100 stars even "real" any more?
All the old problems of the web are new again, and still remain unsolved.
There are many git hosting options, including some for self hosting. its a lot easier to switch to a different version control host than to a different version control system.
Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.
EVERY other client I've ever worked with used their own gitforge or at least bitbucket...
https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...
Seems like it's far from production-ready and there hasn't been much activity this year?
Note that raw user numbers won't really cut it; if 1 million people left Twitter, it's possible that 500 000 of those people joined and 500 000 new people joined; the user numbers would look like everyone returned, but really only 50% did in this hypothetical.
and this assertion is based on ... ?
Github is actually down and I can't push code right now, it's blocking my business which is unacceptable. It's a broken tool.
On Twitter, it's mostly the networking effect, you want to be where peoples are, and unless a large chunk move at once, you are stuck there.
On Github, it's the technical cost of migrating, the git part is trivial, but tickets, PR history and CI/Integration are another can of worms.
Projects which moved away, moved away for good, at most only leaving a synchronized mirror.
Ever since the Twitter -> X rebranding, every time I open Twitter links, I have a very high chance of hitting a "Something went wrong" type page, with a retry button that just does nothing. It's been like this for ages. I barely open Twitter links anymore as a result.
This splintering should happen more often.
Looking at a unicorn page, I feel this lingering hope that it's transient (like it usually was in the old days) but my mind reassures me it's probably going to be a long full outage again.
The hope is dead.
But maybe I’m wrong?
The "AI is using a lot of resources" excuse was maybe acceptable last year but not in Q3 2026.
You mean people pushing LLM assisted coding, or github's own coders pushing LLM assisted code to production ? :-).
I am more inclined to think that it is the second, but if the reason is the first, what is particular hard to scale ? It's not like everybody is vide-coding into a single repository, so I would expect that most of the load would naturally be scalable by increasing the resources. If for some reason that is not possible, I would expect a corporation as big as Github to keep the paying customers working by gracefully denying service to the free tier, not to collapse like an house of cards.
Despite minimal new features, and drastically increasing hardware resources to keep up, self-hosted GitHub enterprise went from things being instant to most requests taking many seconds. And activity on issues in one repository tends to mysteriously re-open issues with the same number in other repositories.
I think they are vibe coding and facing the consequences.
At most normal companies you monitor your systems and address potential bottlenecks before they reach a tipping point. And generally you want enough headroom that a sudden 2-3x increase in demand wouldn't take out the service.
Either Github's technical leadership/talent is completely out of their depth (seems unlikely), or they're not hiring enough engineers to work on these capacity issues.
Anyone here have data on whether the likes of gitlab have been impacted in the same was as github?
But I’m more lenient with codeberg because they are a non-profit and as you say, they are banning vibe-coded project because of the cost to infrastructure. In the meantime, GitHub is encouraging vibe-coding, multiplication of the source code, and genAI discussions.
The original source was Kyle Daigle, GH COO.
- https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
- https://xcancel.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
They need to start getting rid of the free tiers for GitHub Actions and actually charge appropriately or increase prices for it.
I guess they're quite happy with that TBF, it doesn't seem like they're that interested in being a git forge anyway.
https://imgur.com/b0Xj3Z6
Seems presumptuous to assume a root case while the incident is still ongoing, no?
I would gladly pay that fee if it means Github is reliable for paying customers.
If they make it harder to push slop on github, people might treat it as an incentive to generate less slop. Less tokens sold. Bad. Very bad.
The github paying customers are not going to move away.
Plus, it's probably genuinely hard to scale. And they can't throw compute at the problem - all compute is already going to the LLMs.
Last month, I made more commits than my entire 2025 combined.
I still remember that they launched GitHub Actions in 2018 and back then I was thinking: They can't even make the website reliable, surely this will only cause them more problems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086786
Has big tech reached a similar status like banks in that they are "too big to fail" i.e. when they do fail we all just look the other way and say: "well everyone else is out too". Didn't someone recently calculate that GitHub is running at 95%? For comparison the Irish Rail service which is not reliable has 80% of it's trains run on time.
This seems absurd and really challenges a lot of ideas I had about big tech and cloud infrastructure. GitHub seems to have remained the dominant player relative to GitLab etc.
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.
> Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 429 (Too Many Requests).
> Warning: Back off 19.714 seconds before retry.
> Warning: Failed to download action 'https://codeload.github.com/'.
> Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 502 (Bad Gateway).
> Warning: Back off 22.228 seconds before retry.
> Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 429 (Too Many Requests).
> Error: Failed to download archive 'https://codeload.github.com/' after 3 attempts.
Nice - even their own action runners are getting rate limited atm
Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t), go hit the gym or walk outside.
If a work tool going down triggers you enough mentally to start angrily ranting online, it’s a sign you need to chill out and focus more on your health
My significant other was just let go from their job as a scapegoat for an organizational error: 3 layers of failure - IC, manager, director, and the IC was let go. The error caused a 7 figure loss for the company that has 10 figures of revenue per year. The manager and director may not see any consequences, though the director will probably be forced out by end-of-year due to incompetence. The new executive has taken to firing employees much more eagerly than their predecessor, like some sort of Jack Welch acolyte.
Their firing has put a lot of things into perspective for me. Mostly, fuck "at-will" employment and its negative effect on the American social contract.
But also this "angry ranting" online that the original poster was referencing. Not everyone has the privilege to calmly respond to things that directly impact their livelihood.
With every single of these enterprise 'cloud' offerings you are giving (almost) complete power over your business/project to somebody else who couldn't care less about your success or failure, you are simply irrelevant for them. I see it at work too, every time critical external systems go down whole bank stops still, just because few bucks were saved yearly on some on-prem servers.
Look at it this way, you are learning some important lesson today and finding great area of improvement for resiliency from now on.
I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.
However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...
But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house.
And I don't think that GitHub is devoid of SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
The issue is that they're not achieving two nines uptime in practice.
I sympathized with them when they said this a handful of months ago, but then I saw this [0] page that shows how it's been shot for years prior (which tracks with my memory).
I feel for the GH engineers that have to deal with this, especially the SREs. I also don't hate the downtime right now, as I'll make a cup of coffee and do something else. I will say though, I did have a hotfix a week or so ago during the Actions outage, which really was a pain.
You're right that getting angry and ranting isn't the right reaction here, but I do no give them the LLM load excuse. I don't give them an out for having awful uptime during work hours for a product we pay quite a bit for as an org.
[0] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
Or, maybe your #1 IT priority was moving everything to Azure instead ;)
Largest shareholder (27%), not majority.
This is the outcome of violating single responsibility principle in business.
Edit: it seems GHE is also affected by the outage and isn't much better.
- we are getting no benefit beyond getting excuses replies to our emails - right or wrong, but we depend heavily on GitHub actions so this has a very real impact on us
There is no separate enterprise platform unless you buy their self hosted server product.
Which means they have a pricing problem. Rate limit non-paying users.
It's absurd that I have dozens of repos, many with GH Actions that run CI, test and then package and push to prod/package managers, and haven't paid GH anything.
The idea that we should be fine with this unreliability is just amazing. It's not a mental health issue to have problems when important infra fails.
the comment doesnt say you should be "fine" with the unreliability.
they are saying people shouldnt get so emotionally worked up over it. which, while i wouldn't phrase it in the way the parent did, i agree with the direction of their point.
"Github’s servers are constantly on fire as their usage increased something like 50x due to LLM sloppers pushing large amounts of trash code"
"Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t), go hit the gym or walk outside." with assumptions like above.
If it was, "hey they f*ed up but there's no point having an overly emotional reaction" that would be fine. But he seems to be justifying this. Especially with Github's record up to now of unreliability I think it's completely fair to be annoyed.
Which they encouraged by pushing Copilot down everyone's throat
No qualifiers necessary. But try arguing with a lawnmower...
Is this rage bait? Isn't Google, Amazon, and all the other services in the world similarly impacted by LLM's? Isn't Claude, OpenAI, etc.? Why can they handle the load but not Github?
If they are facing an influx of commits from bots maybe they need to start metering commits from those accounts and charge them money.
This is a self imposed problem.
Github and their parent company are active participants in pushing LLM-driven coding.
However, your "(you don't)" comment is not going to calm down all the people, who, you know, DO have a hotfix to push now, and DO have an angry customer that could not care less for which part of our infrastructure is breaking _their_ workflow.
The only things would calm everyone down is guarantee that Microsoft would be paying for _our_ SLA breach compensation. But they don't. And I don't think anyone is paying their GH bill with a prorata of the number of time the platform was actually available.
(I'm also aware that the wording of the contract probably clearly says that you should not use GitHub for anything critical, that Microsoft is only a small startup in their garage, that you can't credibly expect 90% uptime anyway, and that it's all the fault of LLM slop ! Bad LLM slop ! Also, please buy our LLMs to generate more slop, please.)
They could easily tighten things up in that regard, and make a choice that is right for their main users at the expense of The MS corpo mandate/mission. It is a choice to do otherwise.
I find it hard to believe that github APIs don't have rate limits to handle traffic spikes.
I’m not a Meta fan but it’s interesting that they manage to keep their systems up with an order of magnitude more traffic. GitHub’s uptime is inexcusable.
> Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t)
Oh, we do. Given the sheer number of users, it's almost guaranteed someone is on fire ever time GitHub is down. Statistics is a very charming branch of reality.
This should not be an excuse since they probably can use AI to fix it /partially sarcasm
hey bud your bias is showing
I have little time in my day to spend with my daughter. But I also have responsibilities. And one client has decided to bet on github. It's the only client I've ever worked with who has their code on github. EVERY other client has hosted their own gitforge or used bitbucket.
So now I am not angry because some critical piece of US-american infrastructure is down all the time.
I am angry because instead of spending time with my daughter I have to work on this later, because there are due dates and "Well, fucking GitHub was down" ain't gonna cut it.
My mind immediately went to this classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/303/
github enterprise is fully operational at the moment
https://eu.githubstatus.com/posts/dashboard
We cannot pull any actions images (or how it is called) for example.
So with the "elapsed time" out of the way (now over an hour, incidentally), how about "how long will it be down?"
https://youtu.be/iBDUTaKWVdU
https://downdetector.com/
No idea if/when we decide to pull that bandaid but I think once we can't merge a hot fix into main because of GH being down, it'll be a big org push to replace it.
What's everyone else using? Self hosted Gitlab? Gitea?
Did you have the conversation "do we need to move from $whatever CI/CD to GitHub Actions?" beforehand? What were the arguments in favour?
- It was believed that GitHub would be more reliable than our self hosted Gitlab CI runners. This has proven to be very false.
- It was believed it would be easier to write tooling. I’m not on the dev tooling team, so can’t confirm if they found it true or not, but from the outside I see a lot more “Github can’t do that” than I did “Gitlab can’t do it”
Frontier labs and global saas heavyweights run CI through us, plus a crop of open source tooling like Bazel, vLLM, Firecracker, Rails, Ray, Sorbet and Rust.
Shopify, Uber, Airbnb, Canva stresstested the platform ten years ago for scaling issues.
You need to take a little time to design upfront and take advantage of dynamically programmable primitives. It isn't the same ease/convenience as Actions. Bit more available though.
tangled.org!
Tangled.org really been working to ensure all their features work from data hosted on your personal data server (it's based on ATproto) which means should their performance, reliability, or monetization ever get you down it's easy to switch to a competitor since you're not locked in.
Not if you want to make sure it compiles and works on Windows (which you don't have) or macOS (which you don't have and can't emulate). That's something github gives for free, and for me, it's the only reason to stay on github for small/tiny free software projects (at least as a secondary host).
they've had multiple outages in the last week, so i guess they are proving themselves correct.
in practice, giving ssh/sudo to AI (codex) and telling it to setup ephemeral self-hosted runners on your own host VM (qemu), takes about 30 minutes and works extremely well. it bangs out all the shell scripts. moved my own business over to it. zero problems.
you might even find it is kind of neat too. you can customize your VM with software pre-installed. speeds up your builds quite a bit.
[0] https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/blacksmith-seed-announcement
https://status.blacksmith.sh/cmsrg61yg09vd0lo9s1eagibm
I mean, that plus better uptime.
I am seriously, 100%, contemplating the idea of offering consulting for migrating companies and projects out of Github. Given that I am fully employed, I'd only be able to do this on the weekends. Could I get a show of hands to get an idea of potential customers?
Once this is done, the team would have two possible git remotes to work with. Given that gitea also allows mirroring with Github, the team would be able to even switch to Gitea as the "main" git remote and for PR reviews even if the CI part is still on Github.
The harder part would be migrating the CI jobs. But this also can be done in parallel and no one needs to cut out their Github actions immediately. Start with the simplest of the stages, e.g, the automated test suite, and once you get the whole pipeline from Woodpecker on an staging environment, you'd could take another weekend to test the whole workflow. Once the first project is successfully migrated, it becomes a matter of repeating the process.
Woodpecker is still a bit finicky and debugging it can be a bit annoying, but given that it's all based on docker it is a lot easier to debug a pipeline locally.
You have a free bank holiday, go look at green trees, listen to birds, find somebody who's wrong on HN etc.
The only poor souls here are some github devops team (team of copilots?) and those using alternative services.
Well it's 100% down for me, so does this mean 20% of all users are fully down?
> Posted 1 minute ago. Aug 17, 2026 - 13:58 UTC
It also took them 20 minutes to realize that peoples requests to /pull/xx are not working :D
Or is their point about abandoned projects where the dev never clicks release after merging, or even never merges?
A self hosted version of GitHub that is a precise mirror of an actual GitHub repository. That is, PRs from GitHub appear on the selfhosted instance and my reviews from the self hosted instance appear on GitHub. That way I can work on my private instance when GitHub is down (or slow) and I can be assured my work still appears to everyone online.
Does this exist?
…& this is ignoring all the moral reason for avoiding US-based, publicly-traded, proprietary software for host largely free software. They also deny access to users due to US sanctions, privacy-conscious users won’t want to create accounts/agree to ToS, & rubbing shoulders with other corpos your project can be taken down if it upsets the corpos don’t like it (see youtube-dl, Switch emulators, etc.).
GitHub's value is in the PR process, in CI/CD, releases, the issue tracker, and an identity system propping all of that. This is the thing to replace, and it's quite a bit harder.
"Microsoft’s data-center shortages to persist longer than expected - Bloomberg"
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-data-center-shor...
Perhaps relevant tho. I would imagine if they could simply throw more hardware at it they would. And I wouldn't imagine inability to throw hardware at it would be due to software scaling issues. So perhaps it is simply lack of available hardware?
I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
https://xcancel.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
---
edit: see a counterpoint I posted down-thread.
Imagine the software development lifecycle is a river blocked by several dams- necessary processes that also slow the water’s volume and speed. Writing the code was a very big dam upstream, and successive dams didn’t need to handle a lot of water. With that dam busted wide open, the torrent of code is inundating downstream processes. GitHub happens to host many of them.
Earlier this year the GitHub COO shared a post on Twitter with explosive numbers they were facing. I cannot seem to find it at the moment. (Edit: shared in other replies to this thread.)
I would argue they are. You can't cache a git repository and send people what it looked like a minute ago, because someone might have pushed 2 seconds ago.
Alternative theories include "azure sucks" and "they're vibecoding everything now".
Many people suspect it's the year-long migrating to Azure and all their products instead of the things they have been using.
Whatever the actual increase in productivity may be, the commits, clones, pushes, action runs, etc. are skyrocketing.
It is time to give up on Github. This is just too much.
I started with the cloud version, then moved to self-hosted because it wasn't a big effort for our team. We also reduced our monthly invoice by about 50% after the move.
For people who want a similar experience today, I’d recommend trying Codeberg (An official instance of Forgejo) though. However, keep in mind they voted in July to ban mostly AI generated repositories. You can read about that here: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
We also have a free public Forgejo instance if you want to try it first.
* Forgejo
Those are my favorites. Both you can self-host for your company, including CI/CD.
The question is which features do we want of Github but functioning in a distributed way?
Identity? Stars? Issues?
I think it's fine if we begin to move back towards distributed software supply chain infrastructure.
Interestingly the API still works for creating an issue (but webhooks weren't fired).
Seriously. It seems like there’s an issue every other week. It would historically be normal to provide post mortems, and maybe I’ve missed them but seems like there are almost weekly issues and no follow up into the core reasons why.
Sure use it to collab externally, use it if you can't justify running your own infrastructure, but why are large companies choosing to place code externally - which is one secret leak away from compromise?
"Yeah we're unable to offer services, but so is [X BIG CORP] and [Y BIG CORP]. It's an industry outage, nothing we can do!"
NB: I am not OP but just providing some context as to why they might think this.
Did Anthropic or OpenAI fail to sandbox their models again?
https://downdetector.com/
I slowly but surely lowered my expectations.
https://docs.gitlab.com/install/docker/installation/#install...
Or let me ask a more useful question: if we were to move, then to where? Ideally somewhere new (not Gitlab)
Otherwise there's no "we", Git is decentralized. Everyone can use whatever they want.
I suspect even poor uptime for many services is a cosmetic problem for most users.
I wonder how it made it onto GitHub.
2) Issues showed Not found.
Anyway, GitHub Actions for building new release has progress. Good enough.
Anyone else using Fossil?
Thankfully this is encouraging me to stop working overtime for now and enjoy the rest of my night
[1] https://github.com/ljtn/epiq
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates?filters=%5B%22Azur...
That's not necessarily a bad thing for stability, but long-term I would not be surprised if it gets EOL-ed, or radically shrunk to just a basic Git mirroring service.
Discussion about it going ELO has been around since 2020-ish. But that is a worry i agree.
I get the feeling there is a long tail of old-school corps (migrated from the TFS days) that will keep the lights on. And for some orgs you just need "good enough" CI/CD pipelines that are reliable.
Maybe I'm a weirdo, but i find the kanban/sprint board pretty usable as well.
Seems like a simple solution.
You can use as many AI agents as you want (it won’t solve the problem), but with that many outages ever since getting bought by Microsoft, it is more than enough time to give them to change. They don’t care and there is no CEO of GitHub to help either.
A self hosted instance would have much better uptime than GitHub and GitHub Actions at this point as I predicted 6 years ago. [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276571
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
Yes, github now has issues. Github is always having issues.
It's just a constant pain in the ass.
Wherever I have anything to say I prefer ANY other gitforge over this piece of shit.