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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

#201
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…

It doesn't help that almost all of the big tech companies talking about 5 9s are lying about it; "Does it respond to the API at all, even with errors? It's up!" and so on. If you spend a lot of time analyzing browser traces you see errors and failures constantly from everyone, even huge companies that brag a lot about their prowess. But it's "up" even if a shard is completely down. The five nines tech people usually…

Thats the rub.

Once you dig into the details what does it mean to have 5 9s? Some systems have a huge surface area of calls and views. If the main web page is down but the entire backend API still is responding fine is that a 'down'? Well sorta. Or what if one misc API that some users only call during onboarding is down does that count? Well technically yes.

It depends on your users and what path they use and what is the general path.

Then add in response times to those down items. Those are usually made up too.

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

#202

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…

ONLY TWO NINES! Meanwhile vital government services here have a whopping 25% availability.

Lemme guess, those government services are run by the lowest bidder?

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

#203
post #25
post #4

As of recently (workflows worked for months) I even have part of my CI on actions that fails with [0] 2026-02-27T10:11:51.1425380Z ##[error]The runner has received a shutdown signal. This can happen when the runner service is stopped, or a manually started runner is canceled. 2026-02-27T10:11:56.2331271Z ##[error]The operation was canceled. I had to disable the workflows. GitHub support response has been “ We recomme…

We've jumped ship to self-hosted Jenkins. Woodpecker CI looks cool but Jenkins seemed like a safer bet for us. It's been well worth the effort and it's simplified and sped up our CI massively. Once we got the email that they were going to charge for self-hosted runners that was the final nail in the coffin for us. They walked it back but we've lost faith entirely in the platform and vision.

[flagged]

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

#204
post #57
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub have not really got much better at adding new features either though :(

I don't know, it's nice that they finally broke native browser in-page search. That's a great feature for people who hate finding things.

Native browser in-page search is working for me, on Firefox. Is this a browser-specific change or is it a staged rollout coming my way soon?

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

#207

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.

Right. Basically, they give you a coupon to lower your cost of future consumption. So, you have to keep consuming the service. If you just leave, you get no rebate. Obviously, very large customers get special deals.

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

#208
It is annoying. But I bet they’re effectively being DDoS’d every day by AI agents now. I think the past year of that growth has destroyed any of their spare resources. It’s not really a scale problem I’d like to work on, tbh. Seems very hard.

Plus, the azure migration.

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

#209

It's wild because they are one of the most used properties on earth and their uptime is actually incredible.

It's not though... it's sitting a hair above 90%

My comment is that I expect it to be more frequent and less given the scale and usage. Quite honestly, we have the most insane expectations about uptime and availability in my opinion. I'm glad that we can meet them. But still, insane.

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

#210

It's wild because they are one of the most used properties on earth and their uptime is actually incredible.

Define incredible.

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

Overall uptime is 90% (single nine), and the best individual service at 99.8% (two nines).

The core git functionality itself is at 98.98%, which works out to being down roughly a full business day each month.

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