Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 255 posts

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

#171

Post by nilkn »

jedberg wrote: post #139

GitHub is in a tough spot. From what I've heard they've been ordered to move everything to Azure from their long standing dataceners. That is bound to cause issues. Then on top of that they are using AI coders for infra changes (supposedly) which will also add issues. And then on top of all that, their traffic is probably skyrocketing like mad because of everyone else using AI coders. Look at popular projects -- a fe…

> Look at popular projects -- a few minutes after an issue is filed they have sometimes 10+ patches submitted. All generating PRs and forks and all the things.

I think this is a really important point that is getting overlooked in most conversations about GitHub's reliability lately.

GitHub was not designed or architected for a world where millions of AI coding agents can trivially generate huge volumes of commits and PRs. This alone is such a huge spike and change in user behavior that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect even a very well-architected site to struggle with reliability. For GitHub, N 9s of availability pre-AI simply does not mean the same thing as N 9s of availability post-AI. Those are two completely different levels of difficulty, even when N is the same.

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

#172

Post by brummm »

narrowtux wrote: post #70
neonihil wrote: post #54

Nothing unexpected. Microsoft has a remarkable talent for turning good products into useless ones. Skype is another good showcase of such talent.

When will they introduce GitHub for Business?

That has existed for a long time and predates the MS acquisition. It's called Github Enterprise.

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

#173

Post by Andrei_dev »

Our security scanning runs on GitHub Actions — every PR gets checked before merge. When GitHub goes down, the security gate goes down with it. PRs pile up, devs get impatient, start merging without waiting for checks. That's exactly when bad code gets through. And they keep throwing engineers at Copilot while the stuff that CI/CD actually depends on keeps falling over.

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

#174

Post by silverwind »

imglorp wrote: post #96
cedws wrote: post #18

While GitHub obsess over shoving AI into everything, the rest of the platform is genuinely crumbling and its security flaws are being abused to cause massive damage. Last week Aqua Security was breached and a few repositories it owns were infected. The threat actors abused widespread use of mutable references in GitHub Actions, which the community has been screaming about for years, to infect potentially thousands of…

Public service announcement You can pin actions versions to their hash. Some might say this is a best practice for now. It looks like this, where the comment says where the hash is supposed to point. Old --> uses: actions/checkout@v4 New --> uses: actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683 # v4 There is a tool to sweep through your repo and automate this: https://github.com/mheap/pin-github-action

This won't pin the action's dependencies, so it's a shallow approach only.

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

#175

Post by lvkv »

Andrei_dev wrote: post #173

Our security scanning runs on GitHub Actions — every PR gets checked before merge. When GitHub goes down, the security gate goes down with it. PRs pile up, devs get impatient, start merging without waiting for checks. That's exactly when bad code gets through. And they keep throwing engineers at Copilot while the stuff that CI/CD actually depends on keeps falling over.

Do you have one or more public examples of this?

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

#176

Post by zahlman »

saxonww wrote: post #165
827a wrote: 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…

There's a completely reasonable comment by jamiemallers on this thread which is marked as 'dead' even after vouching. Not sure what's going on there.

Presumably what's going on is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 . It's been quite an issue lately.

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

#177

Post by Lalabadie »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #162
windward wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what happens for those enterprise customers now? Is there a meaningful fallout when these services fail to meet their SLAs?

> If GitHub does not meet the SLA, Customer will be entitled to service credit to Customer's account ("Service Credits") based on the calculation below ("Service Credits Calculation"). The linked document in my previous comment has more detail.

It's worth adding that big (BIG!) business clients will usually negotiate the terms for going below the SLA threshold. The goal is less to be compensated if it happens, and more to incentivize the provider to never let it happen.

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

#178

Post by zahlman »

embedding-shape wrote: post #3

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…

That's about when I joined, and all I really remember thinking was that it was cool that I could now share my repo publicly without having to try and run a server from a residential IP.

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

#179

Post by zahlman »

dathinab wrote: post #78
apetresc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then clearly you haven't taken a look at https://status.claude.com .

At that 3rd party side GH is currently noticeable worse then claude ... Like they are down to one 9 availability and very very close to losing that to (90.2x%). This also fit more closely to my personal experience, then the 99.900-99.989 range the article indicates... Through honestly 99.9% means 8.76h downtime a year, if we say no more then 20min down time per 3 hours (sliding window), and no more then 1h a day, and…

> On the other hand 90.21%... That is 35.73h outage a year.

Days, not hours.

Post reply on HN