GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#451

Post by thecatapps » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

mschuetz wrote: post #449

thecatapps wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Like I wrote in a separate comment, it's not a mail server, it's a Postgres database, a Golang app, and backups (and some providers will just handle that for you!)

What do you mean "why"? Setting up and tinkering with systems is work I loathe to do, obviously. I want to code, not host coding repositories. I did it in the past because I had to, and now I don't have to do it because github does it for me. It's great.

Except when Github’s down, of course. I’m saying it’s incomprehensible to me that people would rather put their trust into an organization as enshittified as Microsoft where they get their codebases added to an AI, have an awful experience (the code review UX, for example), and deal with consistent downtime, rather than put a few hours every so often into something that they loathe to do. That does not seem like a good trade-off at all.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#452

Post by mschuetz » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

thecatapps wrote: post #451

mschuetz wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "why"? Setting up and tinkering with systems is work I loathe to do, obviously. I want to code, not host coding repositories. I did it in the past because I had to, and now I don't have to do it because github does it for me. It's great.

Except when Github’s down, of course. I’m saying it’s incomprehensible to me that people would rather put their trust into an organization as enshittified as Microsoft where they get their codebases added to an AI, have an awful experience (the code review UX, for example), and deal with consistent downtime, rather than put a few hours every so often into something that they loathe to do. That does not seem like a go…

> and deal with consistent downtime,

Wildly exaggerated. I use github almost daily and can't remember when the last downtime was.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#453

Post by thecatapps » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 3:49 AM UTC

mschuetz wrote: post #452

thecatapps wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when Github’s down, of course. I’m saying it’s incomprehensible to me that people would rather put their trust into an organization as enshittified as Microsoft where they get their codebases added to an AI, have an awful experience (the code review UX, for example), and deal with consistent downtime, rather than put a few hours every so often into something that they loathe to do. That does not seem like a go…

> and deal with consistent downtime, Wildly exaggerated. I use github almost daily and can't remember when the last downtime was.

This thread is about a nine hour outage in the middle of the east coast workday for Github Actions.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#454

Post by gershy » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 12:22 AM UTC

steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #272

gershy wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess github is kind of a shared garden. Interesting that, like in game theory, if everyone is using it too much, no one gets to use it.

charge more for it. its fine if free customers dont have service. dont break paying customers

Completely agreed

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#455

Post by idkasam » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

muralimadhu wrote: post #144

Does anyone recommend an alternative? We've already moved our runners to blacksmith, looking for a control plane as well. We are tiny startup that ships at high velocity and this kind of downtime is highly disruptive for us

Avrea.com is a great alternative — a new player, but insanely fast and reliable. You get a ton of control and flexibility, and they’re building with insane velocity. I’d definitely give them a try if I were you.

Re: GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

#456

Post by idkasam » Sat, Aug 15, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

yashap wrote: post #244

abidlabs wrote: post #224

It's not too hard to switch over from GitHub actions to other runners. For example, I wrote up the steps needed in order to use Hugging Face Jobs instead, which also enables GPU runners and other flavors. I use this for several of the repos I manage (such as Trackio): https://huggingface.co/blog/github-ci-hf-jobs

We use other runners (Blacksmith), and it hasn't helped, still hard down all day long. Brutal outage. As a side note, I started getting these symptoms (actions staying queued forever or not running at all) at 5pm PDT yesterday, intermittently. And definitely full outage by 8:30pm PDT. So for sure full outage for 7 hours and counting, even if you use other runners, and I strongly believe partial outage for ~15.5+ hrs…

Yeah, that’s brutal. And really interesting that you were seeing the symptoms intermittently for 15+ hours before the full outage.

You should check out Avrea — they’re building around exactly this problem, with a lot more control and reliability than relying entirely on GitHub Actions. New player, but insanely fast. You can even move your existing runners over with one line, so pretty easy to try.