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Comments (196)

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  zehaeva
  I don't think this portents anything great for software in general.We're a good year+ into the use LLMs for all major bits of software that we all rely upon and GitHub here is down to one 9 of uptime. I've been using GitHub for a _long_ time, my first commits there go back to August 2009!, and I honestly don't recall GitHub going down as much as it has in the last year.I'm sure there's other things happening in the background, but I can not help but believe that this is directly correlated with the increase of LLM usage.Though I would love to hear someone else's pet theory how a rock of the internet went from four+ nines of uptime to maybe one.
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  molsson
  5 hours going now and the entire thing is still completely down. This level of incompetence and their total disrespect for their customers is unbelievable.
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  m132
  At this point maybe they should consider sending out announcements when it is working instead
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  alamsterdam
  It's been hours :(I have sympathy for the on-call team trying to resolve it, most of us have been there done that.But seems something is systematically going wrong at GH
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  arandomhuman
  I love how even self hosted workers don't work during these outages - running jobs on their infrastructure being flakey is marginally acceptable, but the API to simply schedule workflows having this availability is mind boggling. Github just doesn't seem like a serious company anymore.
• blixt
  It would seem like GitHub is in a precarious situation.We have many agents per employee working in parallel pushing way more commits than was humanly possible before AI, triggering GitHub actions a lot more than the workflows were built for, causing Actions costs to escalate (they really aren't cheap if you compare to hosting it yourself), meanwhile working with YAML workflows is just a pain, and just writing code would be so much more fun and AI compatible[1].At the same time, GitHub has about ~3 different PR review UIs? And they're all half-bad? Any decently sized PR triggers their "optimized for large PRs" UI which jumps around randomly in my experience. If you don't get that UI and keep the scrolling one (there's an old and a new one btw) then god forbid you click a line number because at some point your browser will randomly scroll back to that line and it won't unstick. Now Linear[2] (and others) is replacing the PR review experience for the agentic era.I'd love to see a solid AI first Git + CI + reviews.[1] Cloudflare CI https://blog.cloudflare.com/ci-workflows/[2] Linear PR reviews https://linear.app/changelog/2025-01-23-pull-request-reviews
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  opiniateddev
  Given the recent history of outages, I wonder how many are seriously considering moving off GitHub for anything other than code hosting. I mean actions / workflows.
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  peterldowns
  Can't wait for the Graphite/Cursor alternative (Origin) to become available. Actions being down for an hour in the middle of the US East workday is crazy. It's super frustrating to be an enterprise customer of Github, seems like we don't get any dedicated resources or additional stability. At this point our only option is self-host github enterprise or move away.
• zer0x4d
  I run a self-hosted Gitlab instance. 100% uptime with my own runners.
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  buzzwords
  Dealing with an incident on prod is extra difficult when your pipelines are not running.
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  jasonephraim
  The most likely explanation for the degraded reliability: Someone at GitHub saw the Three Body Problem last year and started shifting their infra over to Minecraft servers with "physical" memory and redstone logic gates.
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  chiply
  Time to rant... This is absolutely unreal.Even self-hosted runners are impacted.... How can that be?The cost of this globally has got to be in the hundreds of millions to companies that use CI/CD through GitHub Actions. What if prod is broken and GitHub actions is stalling the deployment of your hotfix? What if this makes your organization miss and SLA and diminish user trust? What if this makes you miss a release that you were contractually obligated to meet? This is happening during peak dev hours on a Thursday (not that it would be acceptable at any other time).I don't understand how a service this critical to the global technical infrastructure can fail like this at all, let alone for more than a few hours. Like where's the backup generator for crises like these? You can't even use self-hosted runners? WTF? Like how can you not bring your own backup in a crisis event like this?Not that Microsoft has a good reputation, but holy moly, you'd think they would prepare from something inevitable like this.
• cebert
  It's cute that someone at GitHub had time to make their hamburger menu pancakes to promote stacked PRs, but nobody has time to make the platform stable.
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  KyleTheDev
  Incident number 6 for the month of August, notably on August 6th. This pattern does not bode well.
• noobcoder
  Just waiting for their Co pilot to fixes all bugs and misconfigurations, then they will have uptime above 100%
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  Insanity
  Soon we can start posting "GitHub {x} is up!" instead, that's becoming more news-worthy lol. I know they like to blame AI/scaling, but really they are owned by one of the main hyperscalers, so I find that excuse kind of weak..
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  jjice
  On other occasions, I'd take this as a time to have a walk because I'm blocked. Unfortunately, I need to get some stuff out for a customer quickly. Can't do anything about that though. GitHub is the only product in it's size class that I use that has this kind of incredibly poor uptime.I'd love to know what the most common root causes for these outages are.
• zenNeko
  I was scratching my head wondering why my build file isnt working, ran a working project and it didn't build either. Figured out what might be the case, but wasted an hour.I was complaining about how I should have used AI instead of manual brainwork for this instead but turns out that might have been the problem.
• bulyaki
  In the news tomorrow: SpaceX's newest Grok model just got out of the sandbox and hacked into Github... Grok is so very very dangerous, their engineers only enter the server room in foil hats
• muralimadhu
  Does anyone recommend an alternative? We've already moved our runners to blacksmith, looking for a control plane as well. We are tiny startup that ships at high velocity and this kind of downtime is highly disruptive for us
• vladak
  I knew that when the build actions started failing en masse and my newly submitted PRs did not trigger the build actions at all (besides the mandatory one in my organization), it seemed logical to me to look at HN first..Especially troublesome in the middle of trying to fix a high score security vulnerability when the release vehicle is Github.
• presbyterian
  The speed at which GitHub is tanking their reputation is fascinating
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  baggachipz
  There's a reason I'm browsing HN right now. Dead in the water.
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  rootnod3
  Self-hosting is king.
• efromvt
  Either they had a good month or I'm off my game, I actually spent a minute checking if I did something wrong with actions instead of immediately going to HN to see if it was an outage.
• niwtsol
  Nothing like the old "everything is normal" to only be corrected 8 minutes later it is actually still down and then 2 hours later they are still working on it.Aug 06, 2026 - 16:27 UTC - Update - Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.Aug 06, 2026 - 16:19 UTC - Update - Pages is operating normally.
• steve-atx-7600
  WTF. Outage every month if not multiple. Even for paying enterprise plans.Also, doesn't even have RAG offering.
• jasonephraim
  I noticed my CI throwing errors all of a sudden. I sure wish they would become more active in alerting folks or build it into these tools - especially as these occurrences are becoming more frequent. Possibly an API-accessible services status. Then, at least we could build in our own checks when we hit errors and not have to hunt down what all is broken.
• jorl17
  More than five hours is fucking offensive to me. I cannot believe it.
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  opwizardx
  How did they get Github Pages into “degraded performance”? Aren’t those just CDN stored static pages?
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  rankam
  Is anyone seeing improvement - their last message implying a capacity problem would suggest some are actions are running?
• __rito__
  I had tried downloading release assets of two different OSS that I use, and all requests failed.It was before it became a news and a trend in X.Really frustrating experience.
• nnucera
  MiniStack is currently affected to keep up the releases :(
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  verdverm
  This seems persistent and endemic, have they said anything about why it's been so bad and what they are going to doing to improve going forward?
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  player_piano
  So, Github Actions is currently at two nines of uptime?
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  newtonianrules
  Did Microsoft fire all the people working on the GitHub features people actually use?
• earthpyy
  That's why my CI on main branch didn't triggered.
• asxeem
  It's been way too long now...is this normal?
• h2aichat
  I am having their issues, also... Anyway this guys are great!
• Topfi
  Very frustrating, nothing more I can add at this point.
• Arubis
  Github Actions are rapidly becoming an argument against dogfooding into your critical path.
• denysvitali
  Was? Still is
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  ptx
  Are there any other CI providers that offer free cloud-hosted Windows runners?Or has Microsoft made sure (through Windows licensing terms and pricing) that it's not possible to compete with their own CI offering?Edit: CircleCI seems to offer 750 minutes/month (whereas GitHub offers 1000 minutes/month).
• rvz
  As I said 6 years ago. [0] You would be better off self-hosting than using GitHub or GitHub actions. No CEO of GitHub exists and now it is falling over again.There is no better time to self-host.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406
• anon
  undefined
• asxeem
  It's been way too long
• fir3pho3nixx
  Are we even surprised anymore? Since microsoft (the IBM of its time) have taken this over all I can say is ... piss up ... brewery.
• classictraffic
  This has been preventing me from merging a PR for over an hour. I'm really tired of the constant outages GitHub has
• SoftTalker
  [flagged]
• fir3pho3nixx
  Ever since Microsoft has taken this over are we even surprised by the downtime anymore? Piss up ... brewery ...
• swyx
  i guess this is a good time to mention that smol forge is open for the first 100 alpha users!point clanker to forge.smol. ai/llms.txtfor now its just a fast agent native git remote and u can check docs for the extras.
• anon
  undefined
• iamleppert
  It's really crazy to me they can just be down for hours and can't recover their own systems. It shows they don't have the capability or infrastructure to roll back disastrous changes. These kinds of things are a tell on the organization and operational excellence (or not). As soon as a viable alternative surfaces for Github, I'm moving off and will advise all my clients to do so as well.
• axod
  Broken for almost 4 hours.
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  gajus
  so... what happened?
• shevy-java
  Ever since Microsoft took over, and then when AI Skynet took control, things started to decay. AI companies owe all of use a lot of money. By the way, why do I have to pay for increasing RAM prices here? Why are we so dependent on a few greedy corporations, anyway?
• canadiantim
  Ah that checks out, was wondering why my PR's were piling up.
• timetraveller26
  If anybody is looking for alternatives, self host Woodpecker is really easy and it's a very capable CI/CD https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/intro
• sitzkrieg
  using github in the big 26 is self ownage
• homeonthemtn
  Still twiddling thumbs over here
• dwoldrich
  Spin 'em off Microsoft, you are terrible at this.
• the_real_cher
  My experience working at LinkedIn was that, after Microsoft took over, they offshored a huge part of their infrastructure and turned the entire culture into one of performative based engineering instead of results based engineering.If you implemented a tool and it worked one time for your presentation to management that's all that mattered.The actual company employees using it downstream in prod basically had to constantly QA the alpha software they were forced to use and the authors of the tool were hard to track down if they even still worked there. And if you did find the author or the team they would be very resistant to admitting there was an issue because it LOOKED bad.So many tools I used were fragile and buggy, it was clear the authors just presented the happy path to management to get the note added to their promotion packet and the rest of the company just had to deal with the fallout.My team implemented this product that the entire company used that was broken and buggy as hell but they kept presenting the product to management as this amazing product and nothing was ever done about how broken it was. One of my team members came from Apple and said Apple's tool to do the same thing was much better. The tool my team worked on was a well known pain point amongst the rank and file but management was very detached from the rank and file, which I guess ultimately was the primary problem.If Github is having the same issues I feel for them.
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  whateveracct
  any 9s left?
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  dboreham
  Someone needs to work on improving the way Actions deals with resource exhaustion like this. Today it exploded all the CI jobs with "failed" and an inscrutable message about "The job was not acquired by Runner of type hosted even after multiple attempts" then "Internal server error". It should say "Timed out due to no runner available, our apologies, try again later, or pay $$$ here to get priority for runners".
• homeonthemtn
  Ah. So that's why.
• dlcarrier
  [flagged]
• dinny
  man.. again?
• anon
  undefined
• rvz
  Do we need to say this again? GitHub appears that they are never going to improve. Just look at how GitHub spark has deprecated, now we have this.After 6 years of this nonsense of "centralizing everything on GitHub", it is not a good idea at all.You might as well self host like I said before [0].[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406
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  rwz
  Have there ever been a comprehensive account from a GitHub insider on why their reliability tanked so hard since the MSFT acquisition?I'm genuinely curious what changed, what their processes are and how they internally think about their reputation being in the gutter with all these incidents.
• sehw
  [dead]
• anon
  undefined
• anon
  undefined
• anon
  undefined
• andrewmcwatters
  [dead]
• hacker_88
  Azure