Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was related to their migration to Azure as far as I know
So they completed the migration? Didn't see that being reported.
I don’t know
Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
231–240 of 280 posts
Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
After their infamous "Fail Whale" outages, Twitter replaced its Ruby on Rails / MySQL stack with modern (at the time) technologies: Scala (functional language running on the JVM) / Finagle (RPC) / Thrift (framework) / Kafka (message queues) and this made Twitter stable under the load of several hundred million users. Ruby is single-threaded, slow with poor GC and memory leaks. As Twitter's Alex Payne said publicly in…
It’s 2026 and we’re still benchmarking Ruby using Twitter’s 2008 architecture. It was less about a language choice and more about years of architectural redesign. I thought we were past this by now.
Ruby (language) on Rails (highly opinionated framework) is both a language and an architecture.
Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
#233Github used to be built on mysql / redis / ruby on rails / C / shell, running on dedicated hardware. Microsoft left it like that after they acquired the company. Eventually, though, they decided to migrate the whole thing to Azure. And they were far enough through that to be basically committed... when AI coding started hitting them with much higher workloads. I personally think the reliability problems are more to d…
This is the reason, at least what I know from people who worked there, the azure migration has been very painful as far as I’m aware
yep this was the same with LinkedIn who killed the migration after massive massive costs ~ https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2023/12/14/microsofts-li...
Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
#234Ex-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…
>Spare me the "Azure sucks" comments. Please. Microsoft Azure is the second-largest computing system on the planet The fact that Azure is big and important has very little to do with the quality of the implementation (and my experience with the services on top of it suggests that quality is not great).
Anyone that has to work with azure knows that the bad stability and quality of the platform impact them. Often they just don't have the choice because only choice available on bigco huge framework contract.
Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
#235Github 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…
COOs lie. There is no chance that MSFT would openly admit that its mandated vibe coding activities at GitHub have failed.
What speaks against the volume activity is that GitHub works perfectly after an outage. People don't just stop AI coding after an outage. If anything, the volume should be higher for people to catch up.
It is more like rebooting a vibe coded WIN-95 because of a vibe coded integer overflow (joke).
Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
#236Ex-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…
14x is a lot commits, but I seriously have doubts that some pushes are putting them over the edge. (as many have suggested) > GitHub Actions For me this is probably this biggest culprit along with the general pressure of AI against the hardware. Github actions became really popular. So many of those 14x commits are generating real CPU and network load. This is a really non trivial problem. They can't just wall it off…
Why do you think that?
GitHub Actions is 'simpler' to scale, it's just a bunch of runners, and Azure has a lot of capacity for VMs (mostly). Git itself is a compute intensive process and is far more interlinked.
Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
#237Github 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…
This is the part Github is doing really bad at, it's PR.
Had these DATA and message been tossed around more people wouldn't be so frustrated and would be more understanding.
Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So if I want to push an existing project with 1000 commits to GitHub for the first time, I gotta do it over the course of 10 months?
Encouraging big commits seems antithetical to the idea of git in general.
Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
14x is a lot commits, but I seriously have doubts that some pushes are putting them over the edge. (as many have suggested) > GitHub Actions For me this is probably this biggest culprit along with the general pressure of AI against the hardware. Github actions became really popular. So many of those 14x commits are generating real CPU and network load. This is a really non trivial problem. They can't just wall it off…
Why do you think that? GitHub Actions is 'simpler' to scale, it's just a bunch of runners, and Azure has a lot of capacity for VMs (mostly). Git itself is a compute intensive process and is far more interlinked.
Not sure how you see git repos as a compute intensive process. A single git commit takes milliseconds. It's mostly a hash calculation and a small file transaction. They've added some database stuff around the edges, but that is pretty tame as well.
Actions are unbounded, take minutes to resolve - sometimes hours and there are megabytes, gigabytes of network transactions.
Scaling commits is a load balancer and some more instances of a thing you’ve built over and over.
Scaling actions is VMs, networking, imbalances in load, memory, insuring that folks aren’t running VM training against your infrastructure. Oh, and maybe you want to make sure folks aren’t trying to hack that infrastructure as well.
It is a very, very hard problem.
Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft bet everything on possible AGI, no one thought the result would be a bonafide commit printing machine.
That's not what Nadella said 1-2 years ago. Everyone seemed pretty aware of LLMs soon being able to handle a lot of steps of software development. I bet it's mostly due to Azure being brittle and the AI boom is just a nice cover story (not saying it's not challenging to handle all that new load) to save face and sell more Azure services.
100% if this post (https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...) is anything to go by, it could explain much of the scaling & reliability issues.Perhaps github not being built to scale this fast + being hosted on azure is closer to the truth.