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Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

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Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#211

Post by discodave »

SBArbeit wrote: post #192

Ex-Microsoft, ex-GitHub, laid off nine months ago, not going to violate any agreements, but I will give some context. A lot of this applies to any large engineering org, really. Hilarious that this entire thread is people speculating on things they have no idea about. If it sounds like I'm defending GitHub a bit, yeah, I am. I can't think of a comparable situation that any other web site has been through. This isn't…

Lots of good points in there but when you say "swapped out data center" that sounds very un-cloudy and unreliable to me - workloads in AWS are spread across many buildings unless you try really hard or pay $$$$

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#212

Post by rpearl »

tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

That is 455 commits per second. I know that's not qps over the system but it's not that huge of an input number either. Not for big tech like msft.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#213

Post by infamouscow »

chocrates wrote: post #129
maccard wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub’s reliability issues started earlier than the boom in agentic coding they talk about. I have comments on here from 2025 talking about massive outages with actions and issues.

GitHub uptime is cyclical. It's bad because they won't focus on the core, and then the right users complain and GitHub focuses on core again before it repeats. This is just the latest round exacerbated by vibe coding

Another commenter replied, but was downvoted by angry employees of Microsoft for a fairly anodyne statement.

Microsoft management knows this. It's not like there haven't been attempts to solve these core problems. The issue is GitHub was built by exceptional engineers, and none of those people are still around.

I maintain all these problems began when they migrated off Erlang and egitd. :)

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#214

Post by never_inline »

bhouston wrote: post #15
tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? They are handling it a lot better than Github. Just because you have fast growth does not mean you can not handle it. Instead you have to realize that you are entering into a high growth phase and design around that…

GitHub is not able to charge in proportion to commits pushed, and can't scale in proportion either without it being too expensive.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#215

Post by never_inline »

arjie wrote: post #20
tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

The obvious answer is to end free unlimited private repos. Source is no longer a specific thing. GitHub is just a free S3 or Azure provider.

You can also limit number of free commits to, say 100 per month.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#216

Post by creshal »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #137
fooey wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're the uncontested market leader, you don't budget operations to be perfectly reliable, you budget to not be too unreliable. All those 9's are expensive after all. The AI boom caught them napping though, and they're slipping well into the too unreliable category

> The AI boom caught them napping though Microsoft, who invested eyewatering sums into AI, even near to betting the whole company on an AI boom, is surprised about the AI boom?

Microsoft considers it a bonus if a hype lets one department cripple another department.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#217

Post by cantalopes »

SBArbeit wrote: post #192

Ex-Microsoft, ex-GitHub, laid off nine months ago, not going to violate any agreements, but I will give some context. A lot of this applies to any large engineering org, really. Hilarious that this entire thread is people speculating on things they have no idea about. If it sounds like I'm defending GitHub a bit, yeah, I am. I can't think of a comparable situation that any other web site has been through. This isn't…

I mean i'm sure github employs great engineers, nobody is telling they're nor. But then you look at a graph like this... https://ibb.co/Lffpmfd

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#218

Post by qnleigh »

fallingbananna wrote: post #113
herpdyderp wrote: post #2

non-helpful answer: the "Microsoft Acquires GitHub" line in this graph answers all questions https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

To be fair, before the aquisition, GitHub was super stable, but also it felt like they rarely changed or added anything. After Microsoft acquired them, they started rolling out new features at an incredible pace. And if you look at the breakdown of the downtime, most of the downtime is in features that didn't exist before the acquisition. Though not all of the downtime is in new features. The core is also less stable…

This is no excuse. Prioritizing new features so far above reliability is exactly what makes most Microsoft products infuriating to use.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#219

Post by sigseg1v »

bhouston wrote: post #15
tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? They are handling it a lot better than Github. Just because you have fast growth does not mean you can not handle it. Instead you have to realize that you are entering into a high growth phase and design around that…

Claude has 1 to 2 nines of uptime if you check their uptime history on their site. And I'll note that their definition of up is... generous. Plenty of times I encounter it saying no issues when there are abundant service issues.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#220

Post by rcxdude »

jm4 wrote: post #199
rcxdude wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but you could argue whether these were good product decisions especially given they've probably contributed to the cost of running the platform and the instability substantially. (Github did probably want a native CI implementation but I'm not really sure Actions was the way to do it. It seems so needlessly complex to me, not to mention the massive security issues. The rest of those features are just far from s…

I dunno. Those features are valuable to somebody. Probably enterprise and government, which is where the money is. They basically get a full stack - and if we're being honest, it's actually pretty damn good aside from the downtime - from one vendor and that's important. The Universal Blue people have done some interesting things with Actions too. I guess if you don't need any of that stuff it's an easy migration for…

TBH I looked at forgejo as an alternative to Gitlab and the fact that they had cloned Actions is what persuaded me to drop it. IMO Gitlab's CI has been their killer feature for a while.
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