221–230 of 280 posts
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GitHub’s reliability issues started earlier than the boom in agentic coding they talk about. I have comments on here from 2025 talking about massive outages with actions and issues.
It was related to their migration to Azure as far as I know
non-helpful answer: the "Microsoft Acquires GitHub" line in this graph answers all questions https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
To be fair, before the aquisition, GitHub was super stable, but also it felt like they rarely changed or added anything. After Microsoft acquired them, they started rolling out new features at an incredible pace. And if you look at the breakdown of the downtime, most of the downtime is in features that didn't exist before the acquisition. Though not all of the downtime is in new features. The core is also less stable…
I remember someone in that place telling me "i cant mention AI in my plans because they will laugh at me". That was about 2 years ago. Im not kidding. I dont know what the moral of the story is, but I found it weird at the time ( for added context - i was using AI back then about 10 hours a day, BUT I think sentiment on HN was "still" around the vibe of "you use AI to code without checking every line? I doubt your pr…
So you're spamming github with slop and actual good code can't be merged? Got it.
Github 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…
I'm curios what is the bottleneck then? Because github(ms) has enough resources to hire competent people and provision needed hw to solve scaling the issues.
Hardware probably isn't going to do a lot with demand rising 10x or more at peak times, if they had scaled and tested systems with a view to supporting an order of magnitude more requests than expected then all that contingency resource is already gone. Adding 10% more hardware is going to be very expensive and will likely not have that much effect anyway without design changes to make better use of that hardware, scaling by orders of magnitude often reveals bottlenecks that were not apparent at the previous scales, or were apparent but dismissed (I imagine somewhere in a comment or design doc someone having written “we will need to rethink this if the system is to be asked to process 10ˣ⁺¹ things/period rather than 10ˣ”).
And once you've hired those people, even if they get up to speed pretty much instantly, a system change isn't going to be designed/made/rolled-out in short order so patchwork fixes are still needed in the meantime, and any roll-out probably needs to be gradual which adds further complication.
Scaling isn't easy. Scaling fast is a royal PITA.
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Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though? Like, I get there are other features they have, and things like history, but I don't think it's quite the same. Isn't most (not all) of the LLM's resources stateless compute to a large degree? (Not defending MS at all though, I currently can't create a PR on the required branch for my work (won't load the branch list) and their availability is real…
> Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though? Google “RLHF”.
non-helpful answer: the "Microsoft Acquires GitHub" line in this graph answers all questions https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
To be fair, before the aquisition, GitHub was super stable, but also it felt like they rarely changed or added anything. After Microsoft acquired them, they started rolling out new features at an incredible pace. And if you look at the breakdown of the downtime, most of the downtime is in features that didn't exist before the acquisition. Though not all of the downtime is in new features. The core is also less stable…
Having been through a couple of acquisitions (as a cog in the machine being acquired, not a founder or purchaser or such), the last one at the end of 2025, and seen others as an unofficial close observer via friends/family, I think this is quite normal. No matter how thorough the due diligence and other investigations are pre-purchase, there will usually be an information gathering time before any significant changes are made. Even without that there are a couple of months being very careful not to rock the boat too much, so as to not put the willies up shareholders and key human resources. The first significant changes often won't happen for 3-to-6 months, unless part of the reason for the acquisition is that the company was on the verge of failing or was growing too fast to cope. During that time, unless key people jump ship early forcing change to an extent, things below certain management levels are much more business-as-usual than you might expect.
Github 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…
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.
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I mean they may be working around the clock, but after 5 or 6 layoffs in 3 years… half their engineers are probably still learning the code base.
I don’t think their engineers « learn the codebase » anymore, that’s so 2025. It’s all agentic now, the model learns the codebase, the engineer ask the agents to do their best and believe in themselves
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, before the aquisition, GitHub was super stable, but also it felt like they rarely changed or added anything. After Microsoft acquired them, they started rolling out new features at an incredible pace. And if you look at the breakdown of the downtime, most of the downtime is in features that didn't exist before the acquisition. Though not all of the downtime is in new features. The core is also less stable…
But I just want stable hosting for my shit. I barely even interact with the web UI, other than commenting on PRs.
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[1] Possibly none, are you paying for a pro or enterprise account?
[2] There will be a little indirect income perhaps, via deriving value from tracking users and being able to use the combined content for various analytics (including lately AI training).
[3] Potentially reducing the cost/complexity of integrating disparate systems⁴, themselves.
[4] Sometimes in-house developed systems that might distract key devs from the company's products/services that they can sell.
So you're asking github employees to violate their NDA?
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49353915
Disclaimer: not a lawyer