Days without GitHub incidents • Hacker News Board

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#61

Post by ofjcihen » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #28

dijit wrote: post #8

Lots of apologia for Github here. Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange; especially one that is steward to the the overwhelming majority of open-source software. Maybe that's good-will doing the work? For me it's always been a sour pill to swallow that I have to buy in to a large companies internal politics and practices in order to work on projects I love. I don't feel like I o…

Let me ask the question in reverse: what do you have against them such that the fellow human beings struggling to maintain their operations don’t deserve even a modicum of kindness, respect, and good will? Are you unable to separate the business from the hard working people behind it? It’s not like they don’t know that people like us are counting on them: they recognize that their service is the “dial tone” for much…

OP didn’t blame the staff. His focus is on the company.

Invoking individual workers well-being to defend a billion dollar company is also very strange.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#62

Post by mattmanser » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #45

logicchains wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What happened to #hugops? Does it go out the window because those people happen to work for a company you don’t like? Would you feel the same way about a colleague who kept causing downtime in your product again and again, seemingly without making any progress in addressing whatever issue was causing their repeated mistakes? There are web applications out there that are far more complex than GitHub but have much les…

You don’t know that it was “their mistake.” Unless you’ve personally successfully scaled a suite of nontrivial services equivalent to GitHub’s to accommodate an unexpected 14x increase in traffic, you respectfully have no basis for such an assertion.

Yeah, they should be testing for that, right? I think there's a lot of people reading comments like yours and thinking, is this person a paid shill or what?

The earn bucket loads of money, they should be planning for exactly that. And testing for it via load testing every day.

Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#63

Post by ebiester » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #28

dijit wrote: post #8

Lots of apologia for Github here. Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange; especially one that is steward to the the overwhelming majority of open-source software. Maybe that's good-will doing the work? For me it's always been a sour pill to swallow that I have to buy in to a large companies internal politics and practices in order to work on projects I love. I don't feel like I o…

Let me ask the question in reverse: what do you have against them such that the fellow human beings struggling to maintain their operations don’t deserve even a modicum of kindness, respect, and good will? Are you unable to separate the business from the hard working people behind it? It’s not like they don’t know that people like us are counting on them: they recognize that their service is the “dial tone” for much…

I have all the empathy for people in the world.

A corporation is not a person. If your organization cannot handle the load, then you need to adjust your practices. The organization needs to prioritize their paying users. The organization needs to shift people from new features to keeping the lights on. And maybe the organization needs to find another strategy to manage its azure transition.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#64

Post by mghackerlady » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #8

Lots of apologia for Github here. Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange; especially one that is steward to the the overwhelming majority of open-source software. Maybe that's good-will doing the work? For me it's always been a sour pill to swallow that I have to buy in to a large companies internal politics and practices in order to work on projects I love. I don't feel like I o…

there are two groups of people willing to die defending [billion-dollar company]: HN users and Nintendo fans

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#65

Post by ryandrake » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #8

Lots of apologia for Github here. Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange; especially one that is steward to the the overwhelming majority of open-source software. Maybe that's good-will doing the work? For me it's always been a sour pill to swallow that I have to buy in to a large companies internal politics and practices in order to work on projects I love. I don't feel like I o…

> Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange

More than a bit strange. This is an HNism that I'll never get. Why would you go to the comment section anywhere to passionately try to defend the honor of a trillion dollar company, unless 1. you're being paid to astroturf or 2. you own that company's stock? Satya Nadella isn't going to read a post here and say, "Gosh, how nice of that commenter! I'm going to send him some Microsoft stock as a show of appreciation for him defending us online!" I don't think I'll ever understand company-fanboys.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#66

Post by dijit » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #45

logicchains wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What happened to #hugops? Does it go out the window because those people happen to work for a company you don’t like? Would you feel the same way about a colleague who kept causing downtime in your product again and again, seemingly without making any progress in addressing whatever issue was causing their repeated mistakes? There are web applications out there that are far more complex than GitHub but have much les…

You don’t know that it was “their mistake.” Unless you’ve personally successfully scaled a suite of nontrivial services equivalent to GitHub’s to accommodate an unexpected 14x increase in traffic, you respectfully have no basis for such an assertion.

I have.

You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now.

So, argument to credentialism out of the way... What should we do as consumers if a provider that is a defacto monopoly due to network effects stops functioning?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947719

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharasym/

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#67

Post by 8organicbits » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

kedihacker wrote: post #3

I don't think aggregating the whole platform into one number is fair. It's like adding the whole aws into one number

I think the correct middle ground is a site that lets you select the parts of the platform you rely on and ignore the others. For example, GitHub is "down" for me when I can't push, process PRs, or release packages, but I don't care about Actions or AI features.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#68

Post by mghackerlady » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

zipy124 wrote: post #50

jedberg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not great. Just talked to a hubber last week. They said everyone inside feels pretty dejected right now, and these posts don't help. I feel for them -- with AI coders submitting 25 PRs within an hour of an issue being filed, GitHub bears the brunt of that along with the maintainers. That's a lot of work that gets done with each PR. But they need to make some changes quickly.

But the amount of compute needed to serve is not very high. It's all text. The amount of bandwidth and compute needed to serve a Netflix or YouTube is far far harder and they managed just fine.

they also aren't using azure. IDK what youtube is on, but netflix has actually faced their problems and found solutions (freebsd, mostly)

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#69

Post by Scubabear68 » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

mproud wrote: post #6

Supposedly commits on GitHub are up 14x YoY.

I really don't understand people saying that this is due to AI commits and it is all the volume's fault.

A volume increase that is a single order of magnitude (which 14x is) should not result in this level of failures.

When I compare what Github does and the volumes vs social media companies, payment companies, video platforms, etc, it just doesn't make sense that it is just a volume problem.

It looks a lot more like a platform that already has baseline issues that are compounded by increased volume.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#70

Post by giwook » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

batshit_beaver wrote: post #34

giwook wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't feel too bad for them with their top-of-market comp and valuable RSU packages.

GitHub doesn't pay top of market.

You're right.

That being said, 300k TC for E4 is still pretty good. Plus the RSUs have gone up like 60% in the last several years so that 300k package from a few years ago is maybe 350k or more by now.

My point is that they are compensated well. They should be feeling pressure to get this stuff right when their product is core infrastructure for a majority of the digital products that exist today.