alt Hacker NewsGitHub Is Experiencing Difficulties
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At this point maybe they should consider sending out announcements when it is working instead
Given the recent history of outages, I wonder how many are seriously considering moving off GitHub for anything other than code hosting. I mean actions / workflows.
It would seem like GitHub is in a precarious situation.
We have many agents per employee working in parallel pushing way more commits than was humanly possible before AI, triggering GitHub actions a lot more than the workflows were built for, causing Actions costs to escalate (they really aren't cheap if you compare to hosting it yourself), meanwhile working with YAML workflows is just a pain, and just writing code would be so much more fun and AI compatible[1].
At the same time, GitHub has about ~3 different PR review UIs? And they're all half-bad? Any decently sized PR triggers their "optimized for large PRs" UI which jumps around randomly in my experience. If you don't get that UI and keep the scrolling one (there's an old and a new one btw) then god forbid you click a line number because at some point your browser will randomly scroll back to that line and it won't unstick. Now Linear[2] (and others) is replacing the PR review experience for the agentic era.
I'd love to see a solid AI first Git + CI + reviews.
[1] Cloudflare CI https://blog.cloudflare.com/ci-workflows/
[2] Linear PR reviews https://linear.app/changelog/2025-01-23-pull-request-reviews
Dealing with an incident on prod is extra difficult when your pipelines are not running.
I knew that when the build actions started failing en masse and my newly submitted PRs did not trigger the build actions at all (besides the mandatory one in my organization), it seemed logical to me to look at HN first..
Especially troublesome in the middle of trying to fix a high score security vulnerability when the release vehicle is Github.
I noticed my CI throwing errors all of a sudden. I sure wish they would become more active in alerting folks or build it into these tools - especially as these occurrences are becoming more frequent. Possibly an API-accessible services status. Then, at least we could build in our own checks when we hit errors and not have to hunt down what all is broken.
I had tried downloading release assets of two different OSS that I use, and all requests failed.
It was before it became a news and a trend in X.
Really frustrating experience.
This seems persistent and endemic, have they said anything about why it's been so bad and what they are going to doing to improve going forward?
It's really crazy to me they can just be down for hours and can't recover their own systems. It shows they don't have the capability or infrastructure to roll back disastrous changes. These kinds of things are a tell on the organization and operational excellence (or not). As soon as a viable alternative surfaces for Github, I'm moving off and will advise all my clients to do so as well.
As I said 6 years ago. [0] You would be better off self-hosting than using GitHub or GitHub actions. No CEO of GitHub exists and now it is falling over again.
There is no better time to self-host.
[flagged]
Azure
using github in the big 26 is self ownage
[dead]
I don't think this portents anything great for software in general.
We're a good year+ into the use LLMs for all major bits of software that we all rely upon and GitHub here is down to one 9 of uptime. I've been using GitHub for a _long_ time, my first commits there go back to August 2009!, and I honestly don't recall GitHub going down as much as it has in the last year.
I'm sure there's other things happening in the background, but I can not help but believe that this is directly correlated with the increase of LLM usage.
Though I would love to hear someone else's pet theory how a rock of the internet went from four+ nines of uptime to maybe one.