Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?
I moved my company over to GH enterprise last year (from AzDO) and I'm considering moving us away to another vendor altogether as a result of the constant partial outages. Things that used to "just work" now are slow in the UI, and GH actions fail to schedule in a reasonable timeframe way more than they ever used to. I enjoy GH copilot as much as the next person, but ultimately I came to GH because I needed a git forge, and I will leave GH if the git forge doesn't work.
I second this. GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works. Even basic functionality like the timeline updating when I push commits is unreliable. The other day I opened a PR diff (not even a particularly large one) and it took fully 15 seconds after the page visually finished loading -- on a $2,000 dev machine -- before any UI elements became clickable. This happened repeatedly.
It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.
Github used to publish some pretty interesting postmortems. Maybe they still do. IIRC that they were struggling with scaling their SQL db and were starting to hit the limits. It's a tough position to be in because you have to either to a massive migration to a data layer with much different semantics, or you have to keep desperately squeezing performance and skirting on the edge of outages with a DB that wasn't really meant to handle what you're doing with it now.
The OpenAI blog post on "scaling" Postgres to their current scale has much the same flavor, although I think they're doing it better than Github appears to be doing.
You might as well self-host at this point as that is far more reliable than depending on GitHub.
Additionally, there is no CEO of GitHub this time that is going to save us here.
So as I said many years ago [0] in the long term, a better way is to self host or use alternatives such as Codeberg or GitLab which at least you can self host your own.
The ultimate irony is that Linus Thorvalds designed git with the Linux kernel codebase in mind to work without any form of infrastructure centralisation. No repo trumps any other.
Surely some of your crazy kids can rummage up a CI pipeline on their laptop? 8)
Anyway, I only use GH as something to sync interesting stuff from, so it doesn't get lost.
Not going to happen. This is terminal decline. Next step is to kill off free repos, and then they'll start ratcheting up the price to the point that they have one small dedicated engineering team supporting each customer they have. They will have exactly one customer. At some point they'll end up owned by Broadcom, OpenText, Rocket, or Progress.
> Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?
They claim that is what they are doing right now. [1]
> Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?
It's Microsoft. A reliable product is not a reasonable expectation.
I wonder if GitHub is feeling the crush of fully automated development workflows? Must be a crazy number of commits now to personal repos that will never convert to paid orgs.
IME this all started after MSFT acquired GitHub but well before vibe coding took the world by storm.
ETA: Tangentially, private repos became free under Microsoft ownership in 2019. If they hadn't done that, they could've extracted $4 per month from every vibe coder forever(!)
I was wondering about that the other day, the sheer amount of code, repos, and commits being generated now with AI. And probably more large datasets as well.
GitLab is the solution, if you aren't on it already.
I worked for one of Australia largest airline company, monthly meeting with Github team resumed in one word: AI
There is zero focus into the actual platform as we knew it, it is all AI, Copilot, more AI and more Copilot.
If you are expecting things to get better, I have bad news for you.
Copilot is not being adopted by companies as they hoped, they are using Claude themselves.
If Microsoft ever rollback, boy oh boy, things will get ugly.
The problem is that each feature has been slightly more half-baked than the last one. The SecOps stuff is full of gotchas which don't exist. Troubleshooting a pipeline behaving correctly is extremely painful.
The other problem is that if you want a feature you have to upgrade the seat license for everyone :(
GitLab is no improvement over github, their features are frequently half-baked, their site is slow, and outages are just as common.
I used to like Gitlab, and I've self-hosted enterprise versions of both github and gitlab, and strongly believe migration from one of them to the other for "improved reliability" will be utterly underwhelming and pointless.
Gitlab used to be able to take the high-ground due to the open-core model, but these days I'm not even sure if that makes an appreciable difference.
I still say that mixing CI/CD with code/version control hosting is a mistake.
At it's absolute best, everything just works silently, and you now have vendor lock-in with whichever proprietary system you chose.
Switching git hosting providers should be as easy as changing your remotes and pushing. Though now a days that requires finding solutions for the MR/PR process, and the wiki, and all the extra things your team might have grown to rely on. As always, the bundle is a trap.
I mean, not necessarily proprietary right? There are OSS solutions like forgejo that make it pretty simple, at least as simple as running a git system and a standalone CI system
At this point, GitHub outages feel closer to cloud provider outages than a SaaS blip. Curious how many people here still run self-hosted Git (GitLab / Gitea) vs fully outsourcing version control.
My previous two startups used GitLab successfully. The smaller startup used paid-tier hosted by gitlab.com. The bigger startup (with strategic cutting-edge IP, and multinational security sensitivity) used the expensive on-prem enterprise GitLab.
(The latter startup, I spent some principal engineer political capital to move us to GitLab, after our software team was crippled by the Microsoft Azure-branded thing that non-software people had purchased by default. It helped that GitLab had a testimonial from Nvidia, since we were also in the AI hardware space.)
If you prefer to use fully open source, or have $0 budget, there's also Forgejo (forked from Gitea). I'm using it for my current one-person side-startup, and it's mostly as good as GitLab for Git, issues, boards, and wiki. The "scoped" issue labels, which I use heavily, are standard in Foregejo, but paid-tier in GitLab. I haven't yet exercised the CI features.
I consider moving away from Github, but I need a solid CI solution, and ideally a container registry as well. Would totally pay for a solution that just works. Any good recommendations?
We can run a Forgejo instance for you with Firecracker VM runners on bare metal. We can also support it and provide an SLA. We're running it internally and it is very solid. We're running the runners on bare metal, with a whole lot of large CI/CD jobs (mostly Rust compilation).
The down side is that the starting price is kinda high, so the math probably only works out if you also have a number of other workloads to run on the same cluster. Or if you need to run a really huge Forgejo server!
I suspect my comment history will provide the best details and overview of what we do. We'll be offering the Firecracker runner back to the Forgejo community very soon in any case.
Long time GitLab fan myself. The platform itself is quite solid, and GitLab CI is extremely straightforward but allows for a lot of complexity if you need it. They have registries as well, though admittedly the permission stuff around them is a bit wonky. But it definitely works and integrates nicely when you use everything all in one!
Should our repos be responsible for CI in the first place? Seems like we keep losing the idea of simple tools to do specific jobs well (unix-like) and keep growing tools to be larger while attempting to do more things much less well (microsoft-like).
It would be interesting to have a graph showing AI adoption in coding against the number of weekly outages across different companies. I am sure they are quite correlated.
> It would be interesting to have a graph showing AI adoption in coding against the number of weekly outages across different companies. I am sure they are quite correlated.
Probably a stronger correlation to the fact that vibe-coding has resulted in millions of new repos being created, with automatic CIs being triggered by agents continuously sending PRs for those projects.
This is exactly why so many people are thinking about self-hosting everything. Analytics is another big point of failure and a potential privacy risk that often gets overlooked. Relying on third-party tools means any outage, policy change, or data mishap can affect you directly. Using a self-hosted solution [0] gives you full control over your data and lets you decide how it’s collected, stored, and shared. For teams that care about reliability and privacy, it removes a layer of external risk most people don’t even think about.
I'm starting to wonder if people doing what were previously unconventional workflows (which may not be performance optimized) are affecting things.
For example, today, I had claude basically prune all merged branches from a repo that's had 8 years of commits in it. It found and deleted 420 branches that were merged but not deleted.
Deleting 420 branches at once is probably the kind of long tail workflow that was not worth optimizing in the past, right? But I'm sure devs are doing this sort of housekeeping often now, whereas in the past, we just never would've made the time to do so.
You should reach the same conclusion by trying to use it for this purpose, but also indeed for any purpose at all. Incidents that make you unable to deploy making all your CD efforts pointless are only the cherry on top.
This is exactly why my employer is unlikely to adopt Azure. When CoreAI assets like GitHub appear poorly managed, it undermines confidence in the rest of the ecosystem. It’s unfortunate, because Microsoft seems to overlook how strongly consumer experience shapes business perception. Once trust is damaged, no amount of advertising spend can fully restore it.
They dont care. Their sales reps absolutely know that if you are using Microsoft products it is because you are locked in so deeply that escape is nearly impossible.
I moved everything on github to a self hosted foregjo instanse some days ago. I really did not do anything. Created some tokens so that CC could access github and forgejo and my dns API. Self hosting is so much simpler and easier with AI. Expect more people to self host small to medium stuff.
Ironic that that same AI you're mentioning is probably a large part of why this class of outages are increasing. Id highly recommend folks understand their infrastructure enough to setup/run it without AI before they put anything critical on it.
Yeah, once you start self-hosting your code, it’s kind of nice having control over everything. Makes you think about moving other stuff, like analytics, to something self-hosted too.
Remember the other day when a bunch of yous were making fun of zig moving away from GitHub?
Now suddenly you all say this is not the future you wanted.
Everyday you opt in to get wrecked by Microsoft.
You all do realize you all could, for a change, learn something and never again touch anything Microsoft related?
> You all do realize you all could, for a change, learn something and never again touch anything Microsoft related?
I learned that lesson in the 90s and became an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft).
People sadly shall never learn: Windows 12 is going to come out and shall suck more than any previous version of Windows except Windows 11, so they'll see it as progress. Then Windows 13 is going to be an abysmal piece of crap and people shall hang to their Windows 12, wondering how it's possible that Microsoft came out with a bad OS.
There are still people explaining, today, that Microsoft ain't all bad because Windows XP was good (for some definition of good). Windows XP came out in late 2001.
My company just migrated to GitHub, and it's been a shockingly bad experience. BitBucket never felt like anything more than a tool that did the job, but now I really miss it.
This is the predictable outcome of subordinating the GitHub product to the overarching "AI must be part of everything whether it makes sense or not" mandate coming down from the top. It was only a year ago that GitHub was moved under the "CoreAI" group at Microsoft, and there's been plenty of stories of massive cost-cutting and forcing teams to focus on AI workflows instead of their actual product priorities. To the extent they are drinking their own Kool-Aid, this sort of ops failure is also an entirely predictable outcome of too much reliance on LLM-generated code and workflows rather than human expertise, something we see happening at an alarming scale in a number of public MS repos.
Hopefully it will get bad enough fast enough that they'll recognize they need to drastically change how they are operating. But I fear we're just witnessing a slow slide into complacency and settling for being a substandard product with monopoly-power name recognition.
Someone needs to make an mcp server for my claude so it can check if services are down, it goes stir crazy when github is down and adds heaps of work around code =D
> The irony of githubstatus.com itself being hosted on a third-party (Atlassian Statuspage) is not lost on anyone who works in incident management. Your status page being up while your product is down is table stakes, not a feature
That's WHY it's hosted externally, so that if GitHub goes down the status page doesn't.
noodlesUK|20 days ago
I moved my company over to GH enterprise last year (from AzDO) and I'm considering moving us away to another vendor altogether as a result of the constant partial outages. Things that used to "just work" now are slow in the UI, and GH actions fail to schedule in a reasonable timeframe way more than they ever used to. I enjoy GH copilot as much as the next person, but ultimately I came to GH because I needed a git forge, and I will leave GH if the git forge doesn't work.
sobjornstad|20 days ago
It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.
kasey_junk|20 days ago
So not at all?
tibbar|20 days ago
rvz|20 days ago
Additionally, there is no CEO of GitHub this time that is going to save us here.
So as I said many years ago [0] in the long term, a better way is to self host or use alternatives such as Codeberg or GitLab which at least you can self host your own.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
gerdesj|20 days ago
Surely some of your crazy kids can rummage up a CI pipeline on their laptop? 8)
Anyway, I only use GH as something to sync interesting stuff from, so it doesn't get lost.
bigbuppo|20 days ago
Wojtkie|20 days ago
jbreckmckye|20 days ago
My "favourite" restriction that an Azure DevOps PR description is limited to a pathetic 4000 characters.
wnevets|20 days ago
They claim that is what they are doing right now. [1]
[1] https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
unknown|20 days ago
[deleted]
markus_zhang|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
[deleted]
unknown|20 days ago
[deleted]
philipallstar|20 days ago
co_king_3|20 days ago
It's Microsoft. A reliable product is not a reasonable expectation.
kevmo314|20 days ago
1f60c|20 days ago
ETA: Tangentially, private repos became free under Microsoft ownership in 2019. If they hadn't done that, they could've extracted $4 per month from every vibe coder forever(!)
reactordev|20 days ago
winddude|20 days ago
multisport|20 days ago
dwoldrich|20 days ago
h4kunamata|20 days ago
I worked for one of Australia largest airline company, monthly meeting with Github team resumed in one word: AI
There is zero focus into the actual platform as we knew it, it is all AI, Copilot, more AI and more Copilot.
If you are expecting things to get better, I have bad news for you. Copilot is not being adopted by companies as they hoped, they are using Claude themselves. If Microsoft ever rollback, boy oh boy, things will get ugly.
philipwhiuk|20 days ago
* Originally it was Dev (issues)
* Then it was DevOps (runners)
* Then it was DevSecOps (SAST)
* Now it's AI DevSecOps (reviews, etc)
The problem is that each feature has been slightly more half-baked than the last one. The SecOps stuff is full of gotchas which don't exist. Troubleshooting a pipeline behaving correctly is extremely painful.
The other problem is that if you want a feature you have to upgrade the seat license for everyone :(
stevekemp|20 days ago
I used to like Gitlab, and I've self-hosted enterprise versions of both github and gitlab, and strongly believe migration from one of them to the other for "improved reliability" will be utterly underwhelming and pointless.
Gitlab used to be able to take the high-ground due to the open-core model, but these days I'm not even sure if that makes an appreciable difference.
bsimpson|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
[deleted]
dec0dedab0de|20 days ago
At it's absolute best, everything just works silently, and you now have vendor lock-in with whichever proprietary system you chose.
Switching git hosting providers should be as easy as changing your remotes and pushing. Though now a days that requires finding solutions for the MR/PR process, and the wiki, and all the extra things your team might have grown to rely on. As always, the bundle is a trap.
bamboozled|20 days ago
monkaiju|20 days ago
vampiregrey|20 days ago
neilv|20 days ago
My previous two startups used GitLab successfully. The smaller startup used paid-tier hosted by gitlab.com. The bigger startup (with strategic cutting-edge IP, and multinational security sensitivity) used the expensive on-prem enterprise GitLab.
(The latter startup, I spent some principal engineer political capital to move us to GitLab, after our software team was crippled by the Microsoft Azure-branded thing that non-software people had purchased by default. It helped that GitLab had a testimonial from Nvidia, since we were also in the AI hardware space.)
If you prefer to use fully open source, or have $0 budget, there's also Forgejo (forked from Gitea). I'm using it for my current one-person side-startup, and it's mostly as good as GitLab for Git, issues, boards, and wiki. The "scoped" issue labels, which I use heavily, are standard in Foregejo, but paid-tier in GitLab. I haven't yet exercised the CI features.
betaby|20 days ago
arthur-st|20 days ago
yoyohello13|20 days ago
mrshu|20 days ago
The GitHub Status Page does not visualize these very well but you can see them parsed out and aggregated here:
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
flowardnut|20 days ago
theamk|20 days ago
falloutx|20 days ago
Kovah|20 days ago
adamcharnock|20 days ago
The down side is that the starting price is kinda high, so the math probably only works out if you also have a number of other workloads to run on the same cluster. Or if you need to run a really huge Forgejo server!
I suspect my comment history will provide the best details and overview of what we do. We'll be offering the Firecracker runner back to the Forgejo community very soon in any case.
https://lithus.eu
joeskyyy|20 days ago
dylan604|20 days ago
swamp-agr|20 days ago
tibbar|20 days ago
cyanydeez|20 days ago
yoyohello13|20 days ago
import|20 days ago
hhh|20 days ago
Kenji|20 days ago
[deleted]
ariedro|20 days ago
lelanthran|20 days ago
Probably a stronger correlation to the fact that vibe-coding has resulted in millions of new repos being created, with automatic CIs being triggered by agents continuously sending PRs for those projects.
the_real_cher|20 days ago
XCSme|18 days ago
[0] https://www.uxwizz.com
rvz|20 days ago
A prophecy that was predicted half a decade ago [0] which is now more important then as it is now today.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
danhon|20 days ago
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/796119/microsoft-github-azure-...
bstsb|20 days ago
(although admittedly less load and redundancy)
chilipepperhott|20 days ago
atonse|20 days ago
For example, today, I had claude basically prune all merged branches from a repo that's had 8 years of commits in it. It found and deleted 420 branches that were merged but not deleted.
Deleting 420 branches at once is probably the kind of long tail workflow that was not worth optimizing in the past, right? But I'm sure devs are doing this sort of housekeeping often now, whereas in the past, we just never would've made the time to do so.
devy|20 days ago
https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
And coincidentally, an early CircleCI engineer wrote an article about GitHub Action (TLDR: don't use GitHub Action for CI/CD!)
https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-02-05-github-act...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46908491
baq|20 days ago
You should reach the same conclusion by trying to use it for this purpose, but also indeed for any purpose at all. Incidents that make you unable to deploy making all your CD efforts pointless are only the cherry on top.
pyb|20 days ago
"There's the company with a reputation for having great engineering practices that had 2 9s of reliability last time I checked..."
Now it's 2026, and customers are grudgingly accepting zero 9's of reliability.
natas|20 days ago
athorax|20 days ago
sisve|20 days ago
monkaiju|20 days ago
XCSme|18 days ago
jesperordrup|20 days ago
nhuser2221|20 days ago
heliumtera|20 days ago
Everyday you opt in to get wrecked by Microsoft.
You all do realize you all could, for a change, learn something and never again touch anything Microsoft related?
Fool me once...
TacticalCoder|20 days ago
I learned that lesson in the 90s and became an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft).
People sadly shall never learn: Windows 12 is going to come out and shall suck more than any previous version of Windows except Windows 11, so they'll see it as progress. Then Windows 13 is going to be an abysmal piece of crap and people shall hang to their Windows 12, wondering how it's possible that Microsoft came out with a bad OS.
There are still people explaining, today, that Microsoft ain't all bad because Windows XP was good (for some definition of good). Windows XP came out in late 2001.
Stockholm syndrome and all that.
unknown|20 days ago
[deleted]
oldestofsports|20 days ago
panny|20 days ago
https://archive.is/VD38Q
I wonder how much of these outages are related.
unknown|20 days ago
[deleted]
shwetanshu21|20 days ago
Long term impact? Leadership aint gonna stay to see that.
dijit|20 days ago
alexellisuk|20 days ago
Anyone else having issues? It is blocking any kind of release
rambojohnson|19 days ago
varispeed|20 days ago
frobisher|20 days ago
an0malous|20 days ago
jraph|20 days ago
Do you allow me to run the following command?
frobisher|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
[deleted]
skywhopper|20 days ago
Hopefully it will get bad enough fast enough that they'll recognize they need to drastically change how they are operating. But I fear we're just witnessing a slow slide into complacency and settling for being a substandard product with monopoly-power name recognition.
thomasfromcdnjs|20 days ago
musha68k|20 days ago
elzbardico|20 days ago
neuropacabra|20 days ago
whateveracct|20 days ago
WhyNotHugo|20 days ago
It's just "yet another day of business as usual" as this point.
jamiemallers|20 days ago
[deleted]
jamiemallers|20 days ago
[deleted]
philipwhiuk|20 days ago
That's WHY it's hosted externally, so that if GitHub goes down the status page doesn't.
ChrisArchitect|20 days ago
rpns|20 days ago
The history for today is a bit of a mess really: https://www.githubstatus.com/history
esafak|20 days ago
rcakebread|20 days ago