GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked? • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#161

Post by crote » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

kashnote wrote: post #12

I think we need to have a little more sympathy for GitHub. You could justify the jabs when we could all blame any outage on the migration to Azure, but then they shared numbers around the scale they're dealing with now that everyone is constantly building and pushing with AI. I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers. Yes, they need to get this figur…

Absolutely not. This is 100% self-inflicted.

What we are seeing here is a trillion-dollar company screwing over its existing well-established customer base in a desperate attempt to get some crumbs of the current hype cycle. GitHub isn't "dealing with" scaling issues, they are intentionally causing it by shoveling giant piles of coal onto the AI fire.

GitHub's issues would be over tomorrow if they were to put reasonable rate limits on their services. Stop the bots and GitHub is no longer permanently overloaded. It is an intentional business decision not to do this, and instead welcome bots with open arms - to the detriment of their existing paying customers.

I do have some sympathy for the low-level GitHub staff who have to deal with this - especially those who aren't being compensated with insane Bay Area salaries.

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#162

Post by chris_money202 » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #154

chris_money202 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your proposal is for Microsoft to invest their free cash in helping support a bunch of AI coders maintain their pet projects? Sounds like you should be a CEO!

You don't need to be a CEO to come to the conclusion that throttling to discourage excessive usage is probably a good idea.

It’s not just free users with excessive commits, actions, etc…

Enterprises are benefitting from the same AI and are increasing their volumes as well

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#163

Post by noir_lord » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

kashnote wrote: post #12

I think we need to have a little more sympathy for GitHub. You could justify the jabs when we could all blame any outage on the migration to Azure, but then they shared numbers around the scale they're dealing with now that everyone is constantly building and pushing with AI. I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers. Yes, they need to get this figur…

> You could justify the jabs when we could all blame any outage on the migration to Azure, but then they shared numbers around the scale they're dealing with now that everyone is constantly building and pushing with AI.

How about no? They are owned by a company that is neck deep in foisting AI into everything, AI that a lot of us don't want in everything, they are reaping what they seem determined to sow.

So it goes.

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#164

Post by arccy » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 10:08 AM UTC

crossroadsguy wrote: post #127

But after exploring some options for small but private and personal repos (not foss; not yet at least) I realised I am better off with a free Github private repo. There simply isn't a feasible free alternative for such a use-case without hitting, often a 50MB to say few 100s MB, the limit ASAP. There's gitlab.com, bitbucket (? haven't opened it in ages) but those are not better in any way for use cases like mine. Are…

> free

you are the problem

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#165

Post by shakna » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 10:34 AM UTC

Freedom2 wrote: post #120

californical wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I own a restaurant and buy bread from a supplier — BreadHub. And 99% of the bread that I get is good but 1% of the loaves, they forgot to add flour. Consistently, for years, they always have loaves missing a key ingredient that I still end up paying for. I can be pretty sure that BreadHub have a pretty major internal issue, and should probably be questioning their competence, regardless of their “scale”, and witho…

I don't think this is an apt analogy. The bread makeup is still there, as far as I'm aware, no users have lost any data or are missing "key" ingredients. An outage is more like a shipping issue with the supplier, if it's owned wholly by them.

Okay, let's go with shipping. Current global stat for containers going missing? About 0.0005%.

If any single company reached 1%, they would instantly be out of business, because that is not remotely acceptable, at a global scale.

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#166

Post by herpdyderp » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:21 AM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #118

jjice wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame that the GitHub org that we use at my job that we pay a lot of money for gets affected the same way my personal nonsense does. I don't know the architecture or any of that, but I feel like there could be (and it's not like they would've really known this until the last year or two with the massive spike) separate infrastructure for paid users/orgs vs free the same way they make the distinction with enter…

You can pay for GitHub Enterprise Cloud which is essentially their private GitHub deployment stack that they'll host for you. It's theoretically isolated, supposed to be completely separate from these outages. It's a lot more expensive and has a good bit more limitations to the regular SaaS product.

As a subscriber to GitHub Enterprise Cloud I assure you that it is not isolated from outages, not in any meaningful way that I have ever noticed.

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#167

Post by crossroadsguy » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:46 AM UTC

arccy wrote: post #164

crossroadsguy wrote: post #127

But after exploring some options for small but private and personal repos (not foss; not yet at least) I realised I am better off with a free Github private repo. There simply isn't a feasible free alternative for such a use-case without hitting, often a 50MB to say few 100s MB, the limit ASAP. There's gitlab.com, bitbucket (? haven't opened it in ages) but those are not better in any way for use cases like mine. Are…

> free you are the problem

> > free

> you are the problem

Hey, arccy.

What a pathetic one-liner reply!

(update: since it was being downvoted anyway, removed the explanations part and just left the pissed off longer knee jerk reaction response to another shorter knee jerk reaction)

Coming back to your pathetic quip: what kind of piece of work one has to be to reply in this somewhat apple-fanboi-esque way (where someone says "how to fix X problem in Y" and pat comes the reply "why not just buy Y-latest, it's just $349") and what kind of unidimensional world you live in where you believe someone wanting some free and private git hosting is the problem? Ffs.

So again and with all due respect, please shut the fuck up! Because you don't know me, you don't know where I am coming from, you don't know the why, and you don't come across as someone who would ask or even care about knowing.

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#168

Post by firesteelrain » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:56 AM UTC

selfhoster1312 wrote: post #158

firesteelrain wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are certainly free to attempt to migrate your workloads to your own or leased data center space in your area then buy your own on prem cloud like Dell Private Cloud and deal with all of the maintenance yourself. I don’t think it would amount to $100k/yr and you would be taking on all the risk.

For most teams selfhosting on 1U is more than enough which would cost about 1200€/year for housing + let's say 1800€/year for hardware acquisition/depreciation (probably more like 300€/year if you can work with second hand hardware) so that's about 3000€/year or 97% reduction. Of course you may not want to manage the hardware yourself in which case you'd go for a dedicated server from a reputable provider (i.e. not m…

You are forgetting the labor of maintaining it to include backups and offsite backups.

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#169

Post by classified » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

If you just need a place to host your stuff, GitHub may be good enough. But for an organization that requires a workflow it is utterly inadequate.

MS is trying to catch two hares at the same time, which has never worked: Slop hosting for the masses and workflow provider for the relatively few. You can't have both. But MS won't make the hard decision. Those who need workflow are on their own to find alternatives.

Re: GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

#170

Post by pixelatedindex » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #115

pixelatedindex wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we holding the engineers accountable and not the CEO? The company isn’t one department. Responsibility should bubble up to the top.

They dont have a CEO ever since their last CEO said that human programming "wasn't going anywhere".

Is human programming going anywhere? I mean sure you’re not literally typing the actual lines of code, but we haven’t done assembly since compilers and transpilers exist.

Personally, all AI has done is add another layer of abstraction where “pseudo code” can be the source input and out comes the compiled program. You still need to think about the design and maintenance.