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Incident with Github.com [resolved]

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Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#661

Post by Scubabear68 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #52
khvn26 wrote: post #29

I had a lot of goodwill for GitHub but I think today is the tipping point. 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.

I’m willing to give them a break as I’m assuming they have a lot of scaling problems due to the influx of LLM assisted coding. But maybe I’m wrong?

The thing is Github’s core is git’s core plus extras, and thet core is fundamentally text wrangling.

Youtube and Insta and Facebook and many other social media platforms handle very resource intensive media for billions of people plus bots.

Increased influx from AI is not plausible when viewed from that lens.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#662

Post by dannyw »

kypro wrote: post #399
BowBun wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many weeks/months can they use this excuse? They are literally are at the forefront of this emerging industry and are capturing untold value. To let their product suffer and potentially lose market share because of it is extremely foolish

Scaling can take time but they've had at least a year to prepare. It's not like any demand increase they've seen was overnight... 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 o…

More likely, as seen in a lot of companies, perhaps infra teams got whittled down (or frozen HC, less than BAU, etc) with resources reallocated to AI org units.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#663

Post by ivanjermakov »

klaussilveira wrote: post #456

I encourage everyone to switch to Forgejo. We ditched GitHub and could not be happier. The experience is smoother, faster and distraction-free. Our runners are faster, our CI is smoother than ever. Transitioning was a matter of a few hours, which we took as a fun hackaton.

PSA: git repo can be hosted without a "provider" and any ssh address is a valid origin url: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Setting-Up-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuIdBfjL62s

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#664

Post by mooreds »

stingraycharles wrote: post #52
khvn26 wrote: post #29

I had a lot of goodwill for GitHub but I think today is the tipping point. 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.

I’m willing to give them a break as I’m assuming they have a lot of scaling problems due to the influx of LLM assisted coding. But maybe I’m wrong?

Found this reddit thread from a month ago that talks about the scale:

   Commit volume went from 1 billion total in all of 2025 to 275 million per week by early 2026.
https://www.reddit.com/r/softwaredevelopment/comments/1uv5s7...

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#665

Post by dboreham »

kedihacker wrote: post #114
stingraycharles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m willing to give them a break as I’m assuming they have a lot of scaling problems due to the influx of LLM assisted coding. But maybe I’m wrong?

It should be embarrassingly paralel I don't get how they can't figure out

The decentralized part (git itself) kept working.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#666

Post by prerok »

Xirdus wrote: post #485
AlexandrB wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github 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.

The biggest benefits of Git over predecessors were branching, 3-way merge, and history rewrites (in particular, rebase and squash). As much as Git fans wanted decentralization to be a major selling point, decentralization has never been a major selling point.

Not exactly decentralization but distribution was the main selling point.

In comparison to SVN and other non-DVCs git did not need to continuously talk to the central server for history, "branch" creations, unlocking/locking files before changes, etc.

Linus wanted a DVCS, but they wanted centralization and licenses were expensive, so he decided to launch the git initiative where he provided scaffolding and the rest came from contributions.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#667

Post by usrbinbash »

rbanffy wrote: post #657
usrbinbash wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Infrastructure should be neutral. Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation. The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an ov…

> are relatively easy to host yourself. The value these centralized services provide is the centralization itself - that makes things easy to find. Remember the web before Altavista? Finding anything was detective work, guessing domains, following links through multiple pages, digging in newsgroups, asking around, and so on. Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely pl…

> Finding anything was detective work

And in recent years, how is the centralized world of websearch doing?

https://www.techspot.com/news/101560-study-confirms-search-r...

> Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.

None of that depends on a centralized provider. I have all the features you listed on my self-hosted platform as well.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#668

Post by dannyw »

theappsecguy wrote: post #430
stingraycharles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m willing to give them a break as I’m assuming they have a lot of scaling problems due to the influx of LLM assisted coding. But maybe I’m wrong?

They've had an insane influx. It seems that they should more aggressively limit free tier activity or isolate paid users, this has become unbearable...

Or maybe prioritise humans / human-shaped activity? Agents can tolerate a 503+Retry-After is a lot less frustrating to an agent than a human.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#669

Post by edgyquant »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #661
stingraycharles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m willing to give them a break as I’m assuming they have a lot of scaling problems due to the influx of LLM assisted coding. But maybe I’m wrong?

The thing is Github’s core is git’s core plus extras, and thet core is fundamentally text wrangling. Youtube and Insta and Facebook and many other social media platforms handle very resource intensive media for billions of people plus bots. Increased influx from AI is not plausible when viewed from that lens.

It is though. Maybe you think they should be doing a better job but 12-24xing scale when you were already handling billions of commits is definitely understandable to me. It just does feel like they should have some way of ensuring customers, paying ones, don’t have to suffer so much.
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