hot take: I would accept ads under every PR comment in GitHub if we could get back to 3 or 4 nines of reliability.
GitHub's Historic Uptime
31–40 of 131 posts
Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime
#32I got Claude to make me the exact same graph a few weeks ago! I had hypothesized that we'd see a sharp drop off, instead what I found (as this project also shows) is a rather messy average trend of outages that has been going on for some time. The graph being all nice before the Microsoft acquisition is a fun narrative, until you realize that some products (like actions, announced on October 16th, 2018) didn't exist…
Github actions needs to go away. Git, in the linux mantra, is a tool written to do one job very well. Productizing it, bolting shit onto the sides of it, and making it more than it should be was/is a giant mistake. The whole "just because we could doesn't mean we should" quote applies here.
The same philosophy would suggest that running some other command immediately following a particular (successful) git command is fine; it is composing relatively simple programs into a greater system. Other than the common security pitfalls of the former, said philosophy has no issue with using (for example) Jenkins instead of Actions.
Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime
#33Even better IMO is this status page: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ "The Missing GitHub Status Page" with overall aggregate percentages. Currently at 90.84% over the last 90 days. It was at 90.00% a couple days ago.
It has been pretty rough. Their own numbers report just a single `9` for Actions in Feb 2026 with 98% uptime. But that said -- I don't get the 90% number. Anecdotally, it seems believable that 1 in 50 times (2%) in Feb that Actions barfed. Which is not very nice, but it wasn't at 1 in 10 times (10%).
It looks like the aggregate stats are more of a venn diagram than an average. So if 1/N services are down, the aggregate is considered down. I don't think this is an accurate way to calculate this. It should be weighted or in some way show partial outages. This belief is derived from the Google SRE book, in particular chapters 3 (embracing risk) and 4 (service level objectives)
Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime
#34Do we have metrics for the uptime of other major services? Would be interesting to see if this is just a GitHub problem or industry-wide.
Bitbucket Cloud incident history: https://bitbucket.status.atlassian.com/history
Though I will be the first to say I don't fully trust it based on the flakey git clone errors we see in CI.
Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime
#35It’s biaised to show this without the dates at which features were introduced. A lot of the downtimes in the breakdown are GitHub Actions, which launched in August 2019; so yeah what a surprise there was no Actions downtime before because Actions didn’t exist.
You can click on "Breakdown" and then on "Actions" to hide it.
Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime
#36I will chime in that Jira and Bitbucket have drastically improved performance and reliability over this same time period. It actually feels snappy and they seem to listen to feedback.
Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime
#37I wonder if they got moved to Azure in 2019?
Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime
#38GitHub is 100x the size today with 100x the product surface area. Pre-Microsoft GitHub was just a git host. Now, whether GitHub should have become what it is today is a fair question but to say “GitHub” is less stable today vs. 10 years ago ignores the significant changes. Also, much of these incidents are limited to products that are unreliable by nature, e.g: CoPilot depends on OpenAI and OpenAI has outages. The en…
The article provides a way to do just that - click breakdown then you can deselect any product areas.
Just the Git operations show way more instability post acquisition.
Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime
#39It’s biaised to show this without the dates at which features were introduced. A lot of the downtimes in the breakdown are GitHub Actions, which launched in August 2019; so yeah what a surprise there was no Actions downtime before because Actions didn’t exist.
Even worse, those features show "100% uptime" pre-existence on the breakdowns page too.
Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime
#40[dead]