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

GitHub's Historic Uptime

damrnelson.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 131 posts

Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime

#41

Post by fwip »

fontain wrote: post #22
mholt wrote: post #13

Even 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.

An aggregate number like that doesn’t seem to be a reasonable measure. Should OpenAI models being unavailable in CoPilot because OpenAI has an outage be considered GitHub “downtime”?

I think reasonable people can disagree on this.

From the point of view of an individual developer, it may be "fraction of tasks affected by downtime" - which would lie between the average and the aggregate, as many tasks use multiple (but not all) features.

But if you take the point of view of a customer, it might not matter as much 'which' part is broken. To use a bad analogy, if my car is in the shop 10% of the time, it's not much comfort if each individual component is only broken 0.1% of the time.

Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime

#42

Post by OlivOnTech »

fishtoaster wrote: post #20

Is the pre-2018 data actually accurate? There seem to have been a number of outages before then: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&... Maybe that's just the date when they started tracking uptime using this sytem?

Data comes from the official status page. It may be more a marketing/communication page than an observability page (especially before selling)

Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime

#43

Post by tonymet »

Nearly all the variance is from Actions, a product that didn’t exist beforehand.

It’s despicable to see everyone punching down on GitHub. Even under Microsoft they’ve continued to provide an invaluable and free service to open source developers .

And now , while vibe coders smother them to death, we ridicule them . Shameful , really

Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime

#44

Post by llama052 »

Nearly every time Github has an outage, Azure is having issues also.

Actually the last 4-5 outages from Github, Our Azure environments have issues (that they rarely post on the status page) and lo and behold I'll notice that Github is also having the same problem.

I can only assume most of this is from the Azure migration path. Such an abysmal platform to be on. I loathe it.

Looks like there's an internal service health bulletin:

Impact Statement: Starting at 19:53 UTC on 31 Mar 2026, some customers using the Key Vault service in the East US region may experience issues accessing Key Vaults. This may directly impact performing operations on the control plane or data plane for Key Vault or for supported scenarios where Key Vault is integrated with other Azure services.

Honestly all of the key vault functions are offline for us in that region. Just another day in paradise.

Also the fact that the azure status page remains green is normal. Just assume it's statically green unless enough people notice.

Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime

#46

Post by nmaleki »

phillipcarter wrote: post #12

FWIW if people are looking for a reason why, here's why I think it's happening: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

You'd think they'd do all the testing elsewhere and use a much shorter window of time to implement Azure after testing. I don't think this fully explains over 6 years of poor uptime.

Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime

#47

Post by bigfatkitten »

fontain wrote: post #28

GitHub 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…

> Pre-Microsoft GitHub was just a git host.

And even just that aspect of the service is now extremely unreliable. If outages in the LLM side can cause that to break, that would indicate some serious architectural problems.

Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime

#48

Post by mort96 »

verdverm wrote: post #33
montroser wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-r…

I mean I think it's useful. It answers the question, "what percentage of the time can I rely on every part of GitHub to work correctly?". The answer seems to be roughly 90% of the time.

Re: GitHub's Historic Uptime

#49

Post by mort96 »

fontain wrote: post #22
mholt wrote: post #13

Even 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.

An aggregate number like that doesn’t seem to be a reasonable measure. Should OpenAI models being unavailable in CoPilot because OpenAI has an outage be considered GitHub “downtime”?

As long as they brand it as a part of GitHub by calling it "GitHub Copilot" and integrate it into the GitHub UI, I think it's fair game.
Post reply on HN