Incident with Github.com [resolved] • Hacker News Board

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#801

Post by bad_username » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:31 PM UTC

jubilanti wrote: post #637

Almost 3 hours in and still "We are still working to identify the root cause" Can't even view diffs in the web interface! I'm out! I am willing to pay ~$5-10/mo for a reliable host I can swap as painlessly as possible. Mostly just building little static sites and little PWAs, no more than 500mb a repo and 10gb total. Need a repo with PRs and issues, where people can register free account and contribute or raise issue…

> GitLab free tier has all I need ... their next tier is $29/mo, which is too much.

Pay every Nth month, or M months per year :-) Use the free tier features throughout.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#802

Post by mooreds » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

ChoGGi wrote: post #676

mooreds wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Do you know how many thousands/millions of dollars that would cost to serve!? Microsoft has to spend more money on acquiring games studios for billions of dollars then shut them down.

No idea about the cost.

I do know that very few systems are designed to handle a 14x increase in traffic painlessly (275M*52 = 14.3B), especially at scale.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#803

Post by rob-lag » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

leishman wrote: post #171

I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.

Why not just add a rule such as: "Non paying customers can only upload X commits per day"

X doesn't even need to be that low. It could be 100 or 200. Just something that slows down the agents that spam them with commits/pushes.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#804

Post by stusmall » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

noahbp wrote: post #211

leishman wrote: post #171

I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.

Because any price at all will immediately cause users to shift to another platform, and GitHub's value is that it is _the_ place to put your code on the internet.

Being the _the_ place for open source is what let them dominate the enterprise. Now that they dominate the enterprise, it'd make financial sense to put hard limits on the free tier. It's cynical but it would be foolish to lose that cash machine. It'd open them up for a competitor to slowly build up good will in open source then take them on in enterprise, but right now they are risking losing it all.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#805

Post by frou_dh » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:41 PM UTC

woeirua wrote: post #584

Is there any scenario in which Github doesn't start yanking features out of the free tier to protect the core service for paying users?

Ideally they'd grandfather in accounts that were created long before the spammer days :)

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#806

Post by mbonnet » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:43 PM UTC

IncandescentGas wrote: post #343

Arubis wrote: post #99

This is starting to feel like Twitter. For a variety of reasons, we had a centralized place where everyone of a particular set of persuasions could connect, and this had outsize benefits for the community as a whole. That place is becoming untenable, and with the loss of goodwill and stability, the community’s started to dissipate. But there isn’t one obvious transition candidate, so the diaspora is finding itself sp…

Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.

Who the hell uses GitHub socially?

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#807

Post by copper-float » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

MallocVoidstar wrote: post #309

perks_12 wrote: post #163

The LLM code influx is not the problem. Microsoft mismanagement is: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

GitHub's historical uptime page is fake, they backfilled it with 100% uptime going back to 1996: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=200

Why would they do that?

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#808

Post by dboreham » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

tom1337 wrote: post #469

> Warning: Failed to download action ' https://codeload.github.com/ '. > Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 429 (Too Many Requests). > Warning: Back off 19.714 seconds before retry. > Warning: Failed to download action ' https://codeload.github.com/ '. > Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 502 (Bad Gateway). > Warning: Back off 22.228 seconds before retry. > Error: Response stat…

No fair! You got a runner.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#809

Post by wolttam » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:53 PM UTC

ivanjermakov wrote: post #795

poisonborz wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For which team would be a plain git server enough to manage a codebase?

GitHub is a git server as a service.

+ issues + pull requests. There’s some nice to haves in there, that you’d need some other service or convention to manage

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#810

Post by gib444 » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 7:56 PM UTC

noahbp wrote: post #211

leishman wrote: post #171

I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.

Because any price at all will immediately cause users to shift to another platform, and GitHub's value is that it is _the_ place to put your code on the internet.

Haha people have put up with a LOT of price rises the past 5 years in many industries, validating many company's pricing strategy, over and over