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GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

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Re: GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that labelling any outage as "Github is down" is an overgeneralisation, & we should focus on bottlenecks that impact teams in a time sensitive matter, but that isn't the case here. Their most stable service (API) has only two 9s (99.69%). They're not even struggling to get their average to three 9s, they're struggling to get ANY service to three 9s. They're struggling to get many services to two 9s. Copi…

I love multiple 9s as much as the next guy but that's only 27 hours per year of downtime. For a mostly free (for me) service, I'm thankful.

Most people complaining about uptime aren't free users or open-source developers. It's people whose companies are enterprise GitHub customers. It's a real problem and affects productivity.

Re: GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

#142
post #14

From GitHub CTO in 2025 when they announced they're moving everything to Azure instead of letting GitHub's infrastructure remain independent: > For us, availability is job #1, and this migration ensures GitHub remains the fast, reliable platform developers depend on That went about as well as everyone thought back then. Does anyone else remember back in ~2014-2015 sometime, when half the community was screaming at Gi…

> I wish we could get back to platforms (or OSes for that matter) focusing in reliability and stability That's only a valid sentiment if you only use the big players. Both of those have medium/smaller competitors that have shown (for decades) that they are extremely boring, therefore stable.

In that same period the big players have only gotten bigger and the "Mittelstand" in tech has been practically dying. Replaced by the flood of VC startups that are far too obsessed with "growth" to care about reliability and stability.

(Note that "is this company financially viable in the long term future" is an important part of stability. Doesn't matter how rock solid the software is if the startup's bankrupt by the end of next year.)

Re: GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love multiple 9s as much as the next guy but that's only 27 hours per year of downtime. For a mostly free (for me) service, I'm thankful.

Most people complaining about uptime aren't free users or open-source developers. It's people whose companies are enterprise GitHub customers. It's a real problem and affects productivity.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love multiple 9s as much as the next guy but that's only 27 hours per year of downtime. For a mostly free (for me) service, I'm thankful.

Most people complaining about uptime aren't free users or open-source developers. It's people whose companies are enterprise GitHub customers. It's a real problem and affects productivity.

GitHub going down during office hours in a large enterprise has knock on effects for hours as well. Especially if you are in a monorepo.

Re: GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that labelling any outage as "Github is down" is an overgeneralisation, & we should focus on bottlenecks that impact teams in a time sensitive matter, but that isn't the case here. Their most stable service (API) has only two 9s (99.69%). They're not even struggling to get their average to three 9s, they're struggling to get ANY service to three 9s. They're struggling to get many services to two 9s. Copi…

I love multiple 9s as much as the next guy but that's only 27 hours per year of downtime. For a mostly free (for me) service, I'm thankful.

If there's only a 9 in availability, they've got a minimum downtime of 87.6 hours per year (98.99999999999999999%)

Re: GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that labelling any outage as "Github is down" is an overgeneralisation, & we should focus on bottlenecks that impact teams in a time sensitive matter, but that isn't the case here. Their most stable service (API) has only two 9s (99.69%). They're not even struggling to get their average to three 9s, they're struggling to get ANY service to three 9s. They're struggling to get many services to two 9s. Copi…

I love multiple 9s as much as the next guy but that's only 27 hours per year of downtime. For a mostly free (for me) service, I'm thankful.

I'm happy to report that my one-person sysops has successfully hit nine-fives for the 20th year in a row!

Re: GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

#147
post #113

I don't want to give too much credit to Github, because their uptime is truly horrendous and they need to fix it. But: I've felt like its a little unfair to judge the uptime of company platforms like this; by saying "if any feature at all is down, its all down" and then translating that into 9s for the platform. I never use Github Copilot; it does go down a lot, if their status page is to be believed; I don't really…

This company is part of the portfolio of a $trillion+ transnational corporation. The idea that we can't judge them, when they clearly have more resources than 99% of other companies on this planet, doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.

Why defend a company that clearly doesn't care about its customers and see them as a money spigot to suck dry?

Re: GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

#149
post #113

I don't want to give too much credit to Github, because their uptime is truly horrendous and they need to fix it. But: I've felt like its a little unfair to judge the uptime of company platforms like this; by saying "if any feature at all is down, its all down" and then translating that into 9s for the platform. I never use Github Copilot; it does go down a lot, if their status page is to be believed; I don't really…

This company is part of the portfolio of a $trillion+ transnational corporation. The idea that we can't judge them, when they clearly have more resources than 99% of other companies on this planet, doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. Why defend a company that clearly doesn't care about its customers and see them as a money spigot to suck dry?

The OP clearly never says we can't judge them. He was speaking to how the uptime is measured. I'm not saying I agree or disgree with the OP but at least address the argument he's making.
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