Incident with Github.com [resolved] • Hacker News Board

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#821

Post by verve_rat » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

ajasmin wrote: post #750

edgyquant wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is though. Maybe you think they should be doing a better job but 12-24xing scale when you were already handling billions of commits is definitely understandable to me. It just does feel like they should have some way of ensuring customers, paying ones, don’t have to suffer so much.

Lots of paying customers also depend on the open source part of GitHub to run their business.

That sounds like an opportunity for GitHub to clip the ticket for providing a way for those businesses to support those projects more directly.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#822

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:09 PM UTC

noahbp wrote: post #211

leishman wrote: post #171

I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.

Because any price at all will immediately cause users to shift to another platform, and GitHub's value is that it is _the_ place to put your code on the internet.

[deleted]

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#823

Post by junto » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:11 PM UTC

rickreynoldssf wrote: post #786

Does anyone get the feeling that Microsoft is trying to kill GitHub in favor of ADO?

That’s not the story I’m hearing. Large numbers of developers were moved away from ADO when they bought GitHub. ADO has more or less been on feature freeze for years.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#824

Post by frollogaston » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:12 PM UTC

leishman wrote: post #171

I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.

It's easy from an armchair to say things like they should just get more capacity, or they should segregate free repos onto other servers. But maybe they are doing what you're thinking, and with that churn they get mistakes that cause outages, esp dealing with legacy systems. I've been there (not at GitHub or MSFT).

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#825

Post by dogleash » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:15 PM UTC

leishman wrote: post #171

I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.

>So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over?

I think it behooves them for the public presentation of their issues to too much load. If they implemented load shedding and still had issues the follow-up questions would be less comfortable.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#826

Post by rfgplk » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:15 PM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #664

stingraycharles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m willing to give them a break as I’m assuming they have a lot of scaling problems due to the influx of LLM assisted coding. But maybe I’m wrong?

Found this reddit thread from a month ago that talks about the scale: Commit volume went from 1 billion total in all of 2025 to 275 million per week by early 2026. https://www.reddit.com/r/softwaredevelopment/comments/1uv5s7...

Tracks with some of my internal metrics. There are certain projects I'm tracking (solo dev or a small team of a few people) doing 500k LoC changes _per week_. There's one project that caught my attention in particular because they had something like 800k commits and around 7 million lines of code... and they created the repo in _July_. Also, yes I checked, the repo gradually grew over time they didn't just splat it in the first commit.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#827

Post by tcfhgj » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

aliasxneo wrote: post #656

tcfhgj wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually it's a democracy

This gives the impression that there's a collective group of differing views that come together and make decisions. It's quite the opposite from my experience and they seem to actively chase out anyone who dissents from the collective hive mind's view.

while I don't know if your allegations are true, democracy means there is a group which decides on rules based on a majority vote. It doesn't mean that they have the same or different views at all, although some overlap is probably certain, because otherwise you probably wouldn't decide to join the same association.

Anyone who joins the association (small fee) can vote.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#828

Post by frollogaston » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #612

duped wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft executives have an incentive to pretend that AI is great and scaling it has no problems

I recently analyzed my commit history. Last month, I made more commits than my entire 2025 combined.

And even if my loc were equal vs before, my personal projects used to have massive commits with the text "asdfasd"

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#829

Post by dbmikus » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

stusmall wrote: post #804

noahbp wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because any price at all will immediately cause users to shift to another platform, and GitHub's value is that it is _the_ place to put your code on the internet.

Being the _the_ place for open source is what let them dominate the enterprise. Now that they dominate the enterprise, it'd make financial sense to put hard limits on the free tier. It's cynical but it would be foolish to lose that cash machine. It'd open them up for a competitor to slowly build up good will in open source then take them on in enterprise, but right now they are risking losing it all.

Big enterprises are on a different github deployment, so I doubt they are affected by this

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#830

Post by maccard » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

tom1337 wrote: post #553

mitchjj wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth being upfront with, I'm an employee, but; Buildkite. Frontier labs and global saas heavyweights run CI through us, plus a crop of open source tooling like Bazel, vLLM, Firecracker, Rails, Ray, Sorbet and Rust. Shopify, Uber, Airbnb, Canva stresstested the platform ten years ago for scaling issues. You need to take a little time to design upfront and take advantage of dynamically programmable primitives. It isn'…

How would I be able to run my CI via Buildkite when I still host in GitHub and their API is down? We are currently already using self-hosted runners and they also don't work because either they aren't started by GitHub or can't download the code.

We ran a mirror of our git repo on codecommit when things started to get really hairy, and pointed out CI to that instead of GitHub. It’s still a moving target though as we were using GitHub releases to publish to. We replaced that with an s3 bucket and mirrored _those_ to GH via actions, which had the added benefit of only failing when GitHub was down!