GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

Sympathy? It's a Microsoft company that is being ran with a consistency of a startup in early seed rounds. Their downtime is abhorrent and unacceptable as far as enterprise goes. Their engineers look like absolute amateurs allowing for such low class work it results in their customers experiencing industry leading downtime.

I think somewhere down the line you have an answer to problem itself. Its for a while that companies are not into the business of sympathies, we should probably not get into that side for the topic.

1. Github has enterprise users who paid for the service, their day job requires Github to be available and working

2. Github has generous free tier which is the one which is exploring a lot more with the AI generated code.

It is a complexity in itself but the traffic should have been separated, the free users should not be allowed to bring down Github for enterprise customers (Just to clarify, I am free user myself). And if they do not have capacity it would have been perfectly fine to push back or throttle new users/repositories.

> I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers.

I don't think this is commendable at all. I give GitHub a lot of money and I'm tired of it being wasted with downtime.

We have a business relationship so no we shouldn’t have any sympathy. They sell a service and they’re failing to provide it.

I don't typically have sympathy for businesses that fail to deliver a service as advertised.

I can have sympathy for the humans caught in the crossfire but only managing one nine of availability on a commercial service is not acceptable.

[delayed]

They did that to themselves, and doubly so.

They decided they needed to capture the whole open source ecosystem by turning open source work into social networking... on a proprietary platform (because open source is great, especially when it's others' software). That was before they joined Microsoft.

And then Microsoft pushed AI everywhere, including on GitHub itself with copilot.

I would have liked if they had left the open source projects alone and didn't create that FOMO for not using them.

I have no sympathy.

"Leave the big trillion dollar corporation alone" is not the right idea.

[delayed]

Maybe for a free account.

But we pay enterprise license and GitHub is a big dependency in our software flow.

If this continues to be a problem as an enterprise product they need to do something. Otherwise theyre are going to to start losing business

idk man, we pay stupid amounts of money to microsoft, we are an enterprise customer, expecting better availablity compared to my laptop isnt really a high bar.

Constant building with AI is something that they (Microsoft) promote and are heavily invested in.

No, we don’t.

Give me a break. Sympathy? For microsoft? That might have flown when github was like seven people, but they have nearly unlimited resources to make it better. They're just choosing not to. Let's talk contracts and money before we pull the sympathy card.

I used to be on-call in a high-traffic environment where single customers pushed more bits than entire nations. I chose the role. I didn't want people's sympathy, if anything, I wanted them to complain to management.

If it gets too bad they can quit. Maybe that would be for the best, just wear the thing down until it outright fails and no one wants to touch it. One less bullshit service sucking all of the oxygen out.

Ahhh, I think the author mixed up two values here. That value seems to actually be the average over the past 3 months.

    const incidents = e.detail.incidents;
    
    // ...snip...
    
    const now = new Date();
    const threeMonthsAgo = new Date(now);
    threeMonthsAgo.setMonth(threeMonthsAgo.getMonth() - 3);
    
    // ...snip...
    
    var currentFreq = recentIncidents.length / 3; // <- We out here, smoking these guns with our homeboy Claude
    
    // ...snip...
    
    var earliest = null;
    for (var j = 0; j < incidents.length; j++) {
      var dd = new Date(incidents[j].started_at); // <- eventually incidents[j].started_at is "2016-03-01T07:07:37.000Z"
      if (!earliest || dd < earliest) earliest = dd;
    }
    
    // ...snip...
    
    document.getElementById('n-since').textContent = earliest
      ? earliest.toLocaleDateString('en-US', { month: 'long', year: 'numeric' })
      : '?';
    document.getElementById('n-rate').textContent = Math.round(currentFreq * 10) / 10;

#n-since is going to be either march or feburary. It'll change depending on your timezone because JS's Date object always shifts the date around to match the same instant but in the system's timezone.

#n-rate has nothing to do with the #n-since month, it's just the last trailing 3 months. And even then, it's sort of underbaked? It's moving the date back by 3 calendar months not taking into account differing numbers of days, so it'll under-report short months.

I wouldn't trust the stats here.

Edit: whoops, author updated the template while I was writing this! It now says "Over the last 3 months", though that's still calendar months.

Not sure whether it has been updated since your comment, but the sentence now reads:

    GitHub has had 1125 incidents since March 2016. Over the last 3 months, they've averaged 24 incidents per month

edit: although they also have 1.2 days of downtime (in a day) for their 'worst days' of downtime table, which suggests some auto number crunching is not working as expected.

> GitHub has had 1125 incidents since March 2016. Over the last 3 months, they've averaged 24 incidents per month (↓ 5% vs prev 3mo).

Looks like they fixed it already

Prob used Copilot to write the excel formula...

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2236/

Actions aren't secondary to most paid GH users; and if they are down it usually means no deployments and no tests, which can often halt work.

GitHub Actions is really, really badly designed. The security model is fundamentally broken, the YAML hell is as bad as any, the log streaming lags like hell, they charge self-hosted runners for using their coordination plane, jobs queuing is really slow, and their software for actually running jobs is cursed and designed in a way that is practically hostile to self-hosting.

GitHub Actions is god-awful. Have you ever used any other CI tools?

As a daily GitHub user in Australia I still haven’t figured out why everyone’s complaining about uptime. :)

> Their incident-free uptime on 9-5 EST, Mon-Fri, is probably like 60%.

And it may be even worse in EDT, which is currently in effect!

what's normal working hours? very US centric comment IMO. Europe, India, China, Latam etc. don't fall into your 9-5 EST normal working hour bucket.

That one would be like iscaliforniaonfire.com

Hey! isgithubcooked.com is my site; I made this site in February '26, I think

The contribution graph as an outage calendar idea is a commonly recurring one :). I definitely saw it somewhere else as a static asset first before I made this site.