GitHub is having issues now

(githubstatus.com)

276 points | by SenHeng 4 hours ago ago

96 comments

  • yallpendantools 3 minutes ago

    Man, this SUCKS big time for me. Just a few months ago, $PARENT_CONGLOMERATE mandated all under its benevolent wing to migrate to GitHub for reasons of synergy and efficiency. So now it's my turn at $DAYJOB to be migrating us from our self-hosted Gitlab instance. I already have a few grievances...

    - IT policies around GH accounts make no sense. It's a long story but, in short, you can't use any of your pre-existing GH accounts whether personal or professional (as in, an account I made exclusively for $DAYJOB before The Synergy Mandate) and must create a new one aligned with IT conventions.

    - We don't monorepo hence we made extensive use of groups. There is no direct mapping for this concept in GitHub so we have to manually namespace projects.

    - And now of course GH's no-nines availability :(

    For my team, profit happens to be sensitive to our release dates---a day or two of delay can really make the difference if we'll make the month's projections or not. In another world, I would proactively mirror our profit-essential code but it's not worth the risk making a skunkworks guerilla effort. I'd like to think we can blame The Synergy Mandate in a few postmortems in the near future but of course I did not graduate yesterday, I know that's not gonna happen.

    Thoughts and prayers we keep hitting our profit projections and they don't axe our product for underperformance.

    (Writing this down, I can really feel how this job has changed since I joined.)

  • cromka 3 hours ago

    For the record, it's failing silently, too, showing e.g. "There aren’t any open pull requests." even though there are dozens. That's pretty bad, this will definitely mislead people.

    • dclowd9901 3 hours ago

      Or last week's "If you use merge queue, oopsie, we accidentally destroyed your trunk", which also failed silently.

      • elischleifer 2 hours ago

        We happen to build the perfect solution to avoiding GitHubs Merge Queue - ours :)

        It’s also massively more performant

        https://trunk.io/merge-queue

        • rileymichael an hour ago

          while external merge queues offer a ton more features, i wouldn't describe any of them as 'perfect' based on the simple fact the UX is bolted on. github continues to display their native UI components for merging, and users are forced to interact via arcane commands in comments or external CLIs/webpages. not ideal!

      • scottbez1 2 hours ago

        I was surprised that incident didn’t seem to get as much attention since that was a pretty major data corruption bug, but I guess it was a much smaller scope of impacted repos/customers than a lot of these availability issues?

    • techterrier 3 hours ago

      speak for yourself, we are celebrating having completed all our PR's for a change :D

    • enraged_camel 2 hours ago

      Even when it does show the PR list, it doest necessarily show all the PRs in the category being viewed. Truly nasty issue.

  • Arcuru 3 hours ago

    Reminder to all OSS projects: it is extraordinarily easy to setup a simple CI job to keep your code in sync between multiple Forges. And getting email notifications from a second Forge is 0 extra effort.

    At least give people the option to start moving away from GitHub to contribute to your project. It will, ultimately, be better for the ecosystem.

    • kakwa_ 2 hours ago

      Syncing the code is the easy and trivial part and your CI job is only solving that. And in my opinion, it's not even that necessary for most projects.

      The difficult part is all what's around the code:

      * the tickets/PR (including the closed ones)

      * the links referencing the project

      * the CI setup

      * for large projects, the committers permission setup

      * if applicable, the push/commit/branch rules

      All that will be deeply annoying to migrate on a per project basis, or might get lost.

      But that's not even the worst on my opinion. Losing the go-to platform for finding software is (fediverse for software when?).

    • djyde an hour ago

      Setting up own GitLab instance might be a good solution too.

  • agartner 3 hours ago

    Yeah I think I've finally had enough. I need to start seriously advocating for alternatives since this is starting to impact our business. It's clearly not getting any better.

    • rhdunn 3 hours ago

      If you want a GitHub-like UI (with org/repo structure limitations) use either Forgejo or Gitea.

      If you want a similar but different experience use GitLab.

      If you want something more akin to the kernel experience (i.e. hosting, flexible repository structure, user auth via ssh keys, and a simple web UI) use gitolite with cgit, or alternatively gitweb.

      • mghackerlady 11 minutes ago

        or sr.ht, you can host it yourself if you want

      • dijit 2 hours ago

        There's always gerrit.

        I mean, technically it's a code review platform, not a complete toolbox like Gitlab and co, but damn if it isn't the most professional feeling experience.

    • homebrewer 3 hours ago

      Go ahead. We've been self-hosting Gitea with Drone/Woodpecker for years; either it or Forgejo will do fine if you're okay with their feature set. I sometimes wander into these GitHub threads to have a laugh; our Gitea instance has had several minutes of downtime combined over the last few years, all of them planned (to upgrade Gitea) and in the middle of the night.

      • lioeters an hour ago

        Ooh, Woodpecker CI works with Gitea and Forgejo. https://woodpecker-ci.org/ That might be last piece I needed to migrating Git repos from GitHub to a self-hosted forge.

        Edit: Actually there's Gitea Actions and Forgejo Actions, that might be enough for my use case.

        https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/

        https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/actions/reference/

      • scottyah 2 hours ago

        I struggled with Woodpecker for a bit, but now gitea has Actions that work wonderfully for my use case (and one less tool to support). I believe they also highlight compatibility with a github action protocol of sorts. Might be worth looking into.

      • MiracleRabbit 3 hours ago

        Gitea Upgrading.. replacing binary, restarting. I love it.

        Same for Forgejo.

    • richstokes 30 minutes ago

      Was thinking the same honestly. GH is very sticky though, especially when you have actions and all kinds of other integrations set up. But it’s just kind of absurd at this point how many outages they have.

    • 1970-01-01 2 hours ago

      I'm surprised GitLab isn't getting more attention. Yes, its not a carbon copy, but it is close. Apples and pears instead of oranges.

      • BoingBoomTschak 2 hours ago

        It's close in the sense that it's also Jabbascript SPA crap that needs a supercomputer just to (try and fail to) display a diff of a few thousands lines, you mean? We're using it at work and it sucks massively.

    • cyclopeanutopia 3 hours ago

      I'm now self-hosting Git and CI with Forgejo, works like a charm. ;)

  • mcoliver 2 hours ago

    This is bigger than github: https://downdetector.com

    • MerrimanInd an hour ago

      Looks like Azure might be the common denominator.

      • TacticalCoder 29 minutes ago

        It's nearly as if anything touched by Microsoft was tending to be as buggy as Windows while getting as needlessly complex (and misused) as Excel.

        Can't wait for Microsoft to go the IBM way.

  • iLemming 2 hours ago

    Wow, this taking unusually long to fix. I suppose the team trying to fix it hit the Claude session limits and now can't do anything until the end of the cooldown and the only person who knows how to fix it without AI is out for a surgery. When the entire generation of people who knew how to fix shit without using AI will retire, what happens then?

  • cdrnsf 3 hours ago

    It's a day ending in y so, yes, there's a GitHub outage.

  • vlugorilla 3 hours ago
  • recitedropper 3 hours ago

    Hate GitHub being down, plus hate AI stealing your code? Join sourcehut--it has worked great for me, and I'd love to see it flourish as a platform.

    • yrds96 2 hours ago

      I like the experience of exploring new repositories so I switched everything to codeberg which is where most of the projects I'm interested with are

    • senko 10 minutes ago

      what are my options if I hate github being down but love AI stealing my code?

    • pokstad 3 hours ago

      How is sourcehut different? It’s just yet another centralized service.

      • recitedropper 3 hours ago

        If you need to self-host, self-host. Sourcehut is obviously not a replacement for that.

        But, if not: It is different because Drew DeVault is scathingly anti-AI, and has a history of sticking to strong opinions (for better or worse). Seems like the best bet for off-premise source control if you are concerned about AI scraping and downtime.

      • Conscat 3 hours ago

        At least it doesn't go down as often, I guess. I think most users do want a centralized forge that gives them discoverability and star graphs.

      • arielcostas 3 hours ago

        > It’s just yet another centralized service

        Yeah, collaboration usually requires some sort of centralisation. Whether that is the LKML+git.kernel.org, gitlab.gnome.org, salsa.debian.org or Sourcehut, or GitHub. At least Sourcehut isn't completely proprietary and shoving AI down your throat at every possible chance. The same can be said for Codeberg and almost any GitLab CE, Gitea or Forgejo instance

  • lrvick 2 hours ago

    Every time Github goes down, a few more people move to ethical alternatives and reduce the FOSS community having a SPOF in Microsoft.

    https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

    • tracker1 2 hours ago

      While I appreciate the sentiment... there was something nice about the social aspects of many/most projects being on GitHub in terms of collaboration. I think there is starting to be a lot of friction for many reasons. I've been seeing more use of issues as spam, not to mention even more nefarious activities making rounds.

    • lioeters an hour ago

      SPOF = Single Point of Failure

  • swiftcoder 3 hours ago

    > Users are experiencing intermittent failures to view issues, pull requests, projects and Actions workflow runs

    "intermittent" is kind of underselling a failure on ~9/10 page loads

  • pier25 3 hours ago

    Github has been having issues since the Microsoft acquisition.

    https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

    • fishtoaster 3 hours ago

      This is not to say that things haven't gotten worse over time, but...

      I don't think that chart shows what it seems like it shows. There were plenty of pre-2018 outages that don't show up there: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&...

      An alternate interpretation of that chart is "After the microsoft acquisition, they got serious about actually tracking outages."

      That said, anecdotally, it's felt much worse over the last 6 months. I'd guess it's a combination of MS-induced quality drops and AI-induced scale increases.

      • thayne 2 hours ago

        I think it is probably a combination of:

        - Switching to Azure

        - Adding more AI features

        - Using AI more for development

        - Higher load caused by AI agents

        Three of those are top-down direction from MS.

      • r14c 2 hours ago

        They're moving to Azure and had to fix up Azure first to be stable enough for GH to even consider moving.

        I'm guessing its a combo of Azure still not being stable enough and a byproduct of trying to move an entire company's operations from a physical DC into a cloud while its running.

      • shevy-java 2 hours ago

        Well, perhaps not as long ago (e. g. from the acquisition), but if you look at the last four weeks or so, just that part alone, you can clearly see that something is not working here. Microsoft is constantly mentioned on Hacker News and not typically in a great, praising light.

        • madeofpalk 2 hours ago

          If it’s just the last 4 weeks, then I would say it seems the Microsoft acquisition had little impact on their reliability.

          It seems pretty reasonable that the massive surge in AI over the past 6 months has put tremendous strain on GitHub’s infrastructure, and most of these outages are as a result of that one way or another.

    • 2ndorderthought 3 hours ago

      That's damning. I wonder what it will look like over the next 13 months as more and more code is written by ai

      • corvad 3 hours ago

        Too bad Copilot's having issues and as such it will take longer for recovery.

      • dclowd9901 3 hours ago

        I kind of had assumed that had already begun impacting downtime, though I guess it would be good to get some confirmation.

    • danny_codes 2 hours ago

      Microslop!

      It’s astonishing how bad their software is now. I guess 20 years of outsourcing and bean-counting will do that

    • adverbly 2 hours ago

      You know what else changed around this time?

      They dropped Ruby on Rails.

      Ruby on rails got a bad rap IMO.

      It was maybe the epitome of the get shit done internet era, and despite AI's proported productivity gains, I actually don't think we've got anywhere close to the velocity, stability, and simplicity of the peak Rails era just coming out of those PHP days. And teams were actually way smaller than they are now even after all these AI cuts!

    • badeeya 3 hours ago

      seems like it couldve been covid instead? look closer at the months and also we need a y bar for "msft makes github do xyz"

      • hx8 3 hours ago

        We cannot blame December 2019 uptime on covid-19.

    • wldcordeiro 3 hours ago

      Seems like every week or so there's status issues. Often at what feels like the start of the week too.

    • BoingBoomTschak 2 hours ago

      And even when it's "working", it isn't. See this gem: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/142308

    • surgical_fire 2 hours ago

      Tbh, for a while GitHub didn't seem to be any more nor less reliable than prior to MS acquiring it.

      But in the past year or so, it does feel like outages are becoming commonplace.

    • rvz 3 hours ago

      And when they introduced "Free" for everyone including teams, well I tried to warn everyone that centralizing everything to GitHub was not a good idea [0] 6 years ago.

      [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

    • rrr_oh_man 3 hours ago

      Wtf. Why is that?

  • tracker1 3 hours ago

    Been noticing this all day.. various workflows failing in weird ways.. strange UI issues... Literally holding off on our deployment for a day... bad enough it seems like I'm fixing a CI/CD breakage once a month or more.

  • dsagent 3 hours ago

    An increasingly disturbing trend from Github and I only see this getting worse.

    I wouldn't rule out them moving away from offering the free tier to stop the all the code pushes. I think new code mostly written by AI isn't that appealing of a data set to train on.

  • mrshu 3 hours ago

    Their uptime for just Git operations has been hit pretty hard in the past 90 days:

    https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

    • winfredJa 3 hours ago

      why is this green for today, even though the offical page shows error.

      • JamesCoyne 3 hours ago

        Git ops seem fine. Anything search related is intermittent at best

  • lawn an hour ago

    Just today I finished migrated all my public and private repositories to Forgejo, with a push mirror to Codeberg for relevant public repos.

    It's unbeleivably snappy and fast. I can't recommend Forgejo enough.

  • Gabrielfair 3 hours ago

    Its sad that we are reaching the point where a large swatch of he planet is affected by the same thing and we don't get much of an investigation

    • corvad 3 hours ago

      I guess a full postmortem like any other company would be too much as they have outages each week, sometimes multiple times a week.

  • ttouch 3 hours ago

    we'll start posting only when gh is 100% up and it'll make it to the frontpage

  • sasham 2 hours ago

    We're barely starting to see AI's impact on infra - probably <1% of what's coming. Repo hosting as it is today won't scale - it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, starting with basic architecture. And I don't think we should go back to self hosting and sharing patches over email...

    (FWIW https://diversion.dev is at 100% uptime. Different scale, obviously, but also we're not Microsoft.)

    • ragall an hour ago

      I suggest testing your website with uBlock (and all its filter lists enabled). All I see is an almost empty page. Don't point to JS or CSS on third-party CDNs because due to the changes in cross-site sharing, neither Chrome nor Firefox will benefit from cacheing.

  • MerrimanInd 3 hours ago

    It's crazy that the systems the best designed for decentralization like git, email, and the internet itself wound up being the most centralized with single points of failure.

    • scottyah 2 hours ago

      github was always a git anti-pattern chosen for convenience.

  • lukax 3 hours ago

    It looks like migration to Azure is not going very well

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173

  • collabs 3 hours ago

    I am on azure US east and I suspect this is an azure service issue.

    I don't trust Microsoft's status page. It might be "fine" over all but it definitely is not fine for me.

  • bakies 3 hours ago

    I am once again here to say that my gitea has better uptime since I deployed it. It's way snappier too. Long live self-hosting. Diversify from the cloud, build your own!

    • tomxor 3 hours ago

      Another happy self hosted Gitea user here for ~3 years now.

      Came from Gitlab which started pushing out basic users in 2022 with massive price hikes. I weighed Github as an option but was like "no I don't want to be dealing with this same problem in another 5 years" when some other rug pull or degradation happens with that service. So I'm feeling pretty validated for that decision these days.

      The speed improvement was massive (super low latency), and was worth the switch on it's own, but we also saved 90% in immediate cost... probably more in secondary effects from the git host just not being a pain point. The only long or unplanned downtime we've had was 2 hours in that whole 3 years where the tiny Linode VPS host had a total hardware failure and got migrated, which is a pretty damn good number of 9s for a simple easy to host single server solution. We also gained more durable and fast offsite backups (zfs) that Gitlab could never offer, but that's more of a custom self hosted thing not specific to Gitea.

    • dclowd9901 3 hours ago

      What's your general increase of cost and maintenance overhead? How many devs and repos do you have?

  • arcza 3 hours ago

    Well... my gitlab.internal.corp.com is up. As it is every day. Takes about 1 hour every few months of maintenance work at most.

  • erikbye 3 hours ago

    Made my own github alternative ways back. Kind of like cgit on steroids. I only use github for free backup now.

  • CptKriechstrom 3 hours ago

    It feels like that every time I need to put in some evening hours to get things done, github knows and turns the chaos monkey up to eleven.

  • footy 2 hours ago

    evergreen post really. Github has done nothing in the last few years but get worse.

  • m3nu 3 hours ago

    Releases aren't being published for me.

  • SenHeng 4 hours ago

    For the past hour, the PR or Issues pages would load with 0 items. Occasionally, there’s an error toast mentioning ‘failure to fetch data’.

    • swiftcoder 3 hours ago

      Oh, it's even more fun than that. If you sit there hitting F5, sooner or later you will get a proper page load. So some small subset of the servers is vending the correct data, and the rest not

  • blurbleblurble 3 hours ago

    Maybe that's why I couldn't filter my stars by language

  • hx8 3 hours ago

    My new projects do not use GitHub, and will not use GitHub as anything more than a mirror. Two nines of reliability isn't enough for devtools.

    GitHub is in a tight space right now. The pace of software development is increasing and they are in a load-bearing position. In addition, their GitHub Copilot license was a massive loss-leader both directly costing them money, and making the traffic problem even worse. Simply put, they aren't prioritizing scaling and reliability like they need to be in this current situation and instead are focusing on feature build outs that boil down to being Microsoft's AI Middleman Salesperson.

    Their position is hard, but they are potentially fumbling the ball in a big way. I for one don't trust them to not be down right before I want to do a production deploy.

  • corvad 3 hours ago

    At this point it's a weekly occurrence...

    • loloquwowndueo 3 hours ago

      All that reliability work must have paid off if it’s only happening weekly these days! lol

  • rvz 3 hours ago

    I think we have given GitHub enough time (more than half a decade) after Microsoft acquired it to sort itself out.

    It is now being run into the ground.

    At this point their chatbots Tay.ai, Zo, and Copilot are wrecking the platform and there is no CEO of GitHub to complain to about this so it now makes no sense to use GitHub at all. (Especially GitHub Actions)

    It is now time to self host and not "centralize everything to GitHub". [0]

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

  • shevy-java 2 hours ago

    Microsoft is making bad publicity lately. First GitHub, then the bad recent AI news (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-27/microsoft...). They are truly, slowly, becoming Microslop Incorporated.

    The Empire may fall ...

  • m_a_t_t_8_6 4 hours ago

    Pr's don't load, issues don't load. Pretty much unusable for dev workflows. I felt like a lot of the hand wringing over GH reliability was a bit dramatic but this one seems pretty major (at least for me) and doesn't seem to even be getting that much coverage.

  • Lapalux 3 hours ago

    What a joke

  • leonardoaraujo 3 hours ago

    here we go ....