- The worst part of all this is that GitHub's CTO and VP of Engineering sent out the usual "here's what we'll do to fix things" letter to their larger customers and, without exaggeration, it boiled down to: 1) "Here's a bunch of stuff we already did!" which... clearly isn't working, and 2) "We're continuing our Azure migration." also clearly not working.
So needless to say, if you depend on GitHub for critical business operations, you need to start thinking about what a world without GitHub looks like for your business and start working your way toward that. I know my confidence in GitHub's engineering leadership is at rock bottom.
- I could sorta see a situation where the reality is "we're in the middle of a miserable transition and it'll clean up when we're done" but I don't think anyone has confidence that's all it is at this point.
- Even that doesn’t really make sense to me, unless they’ve done it in a way where everything has to move at once.
Everywhere I’ve worked, if a migration is causing this much downtime then you kill the migration or slow it down. If every change has a 10% chance of bringing the site down, you only do a change every week or two until you can work out the kinks.
- I mean, they are seemingly breaking every week or two so that might be what they are doing.
- also it should be noted that LinkedIn had a 5 year plan of migrating everything to azure but abandoned it after a year.
- ooooh, they're migrating to Azure, now everything makes sense.
- Here are some relevant excerpts from an October 2025 article[1]:
> In a message to GitHub’s staff, CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data center. “It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot, which are changing how people use GitHub,” he writes.
> The plan, he writes, is for GitHub to completely move out of its own data centers in 24 months. “This means we have 18 months to execute (with a 6 month buffer),” Fedorov’s memo says. He acknowledges that since any migration of this scope will have to run in parallel on both the new and old infrastructure for at least six months, the team realistically needs to get this work done in the next 12 months.
If you consider that six month parallel window to have started from the time of the October memo (written presumably at the start of October), then that puts us currently or past the point where they would have cut off their old DC and defaulted to Azure only.
Whether plans or timelines changed, I have no idea of course but the above does make for a convenient timeline that would explain the recent instability. Of course, it could also just be symptomatic of increased AI usage generally and the same problems might have surfaced at a software level regardless of whether they were in a DC or on Azure.
Putting that nuance aside, personally I like the idea that Azure is simply a giant pile of shit operated by a corporation with no taste.
[1]: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
- >It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot
if by chance the CTO reads this, as a user of GitHub I would find it really existential if GitHub continues functioning as a reliable hub for git workflows (hence the name), and I have the strong suspicion nobody except for the shareholders gives a lick about copilot or 'AI' if it makes the core service the site was designed for unusable
- For GitHub to remain profitable they have to appease those shareholders you mentioned.
- yeah currently working with Azure. what a PITA.
I wonder if the extended downtime is just due to the on-call engineers waiting for their azure auth tokens to refresh within azure's own damn network.
- i heard that they asked LinkedIn to do this too and they either refused or their systems were too complex so they refused to. Maybe that explains why LI availability seems ok
- Azure, the color of BSOD
- they're not just migrating to Azure, they're vibrating to Azure!
- I second this. I'm done.
- Is "migrating to Azure" the new "migrating to SAP?"
- That’s not for to … SAP.
- It's starting to really look like the AI effect. It might be coincidence but I've noticed a lot more downtime and bad software lately. The last Nvidia drivers gave me a blue screen (last week or so), and speaking about Windows, I froze updates last year because it was clear they were introducing a bunch of issues with every update (not to mention unwanted features).
I like AI but actually not for coding because code quality is correlated to how well you understand the underlying systems you're building on, and AI is not really reasoning on this level at all. It's clearly synthesizing training data and it's useful in limited ways.
- GitHub has been unreliable since before AI. Though it's definitely gotten far worse.
Seemingly the decline started with the Microsoft acquisition in 2018, and subsequent "unlimited private repository" change in 2019 (to match Gitlab's popular offer)
- One example is the search being broken for CI logs. It takes over your browser's search hotkey too. What happens is every stage of the log is collapsed so the search doesn't work until you trigger the expansion but if you attempt to search before expanding the search will never work after it's been initialized. It's pretty infuriating when you're trying to find something in a giant build log.
- [dead]
- Took a full 8 years for a Microsoft acquisition to go to shit, which is probably a record. Kudos to the Github team for holding out this long.
- I’m still baffled that Minecraft is doing so well, despite the whole Bedrock thing. At this point I think Microsoft just forgot that they bought Mojang.
- Its had its fair share of outages and outrageous changes that overreach the bounds as well. Its more stable than github is but its had at least 2 sessions of downtime this year that I recall and they were both quite long (day length).
- They'd lose a whole lot of users if they killed Java edition, since the modded community is so large. They'd quickly find one of the Minecraft clones reaching feature parity. And there's no good reason for it - it's not like Java is a threat anymore.
- Exactly. So why isn't Microsoft doing just that? Isn't that how Microsoft usually handles things? Just look at Xbox. They essentially screwed up everything they could and then some.
- If I remember correctly UK players can no longer chat at all until they verify their ID.
- Minecraft is a trick up their sleeve yet to be used. Manipulate and indoctrinate the youth.
- Indoctrinated by cubic cows
- GitHub has always been incredibly outage riddled no? This is not a MSFT thing
- I don't remember that happening so much (if ever) in, say, 2016. But the frequency of noticeable incidents seemingly has been rising steadily since around 2023. The Azure migration apparently only exacerbated it.
- I remember it going down semi-regularly in the 2013+ era, and seeing HN posts about it. Especially if you were using a package manager reliant on GitHub like Cocoapods. It seems to me it is more "impactful" on the dev community now that they have gone past just being a centralized Git server for the team, to being the thing that does deploys and all sorts of other things.
- Circa 2019, my office had a bell that we would ring whenever GitHub had an outage, and it was rung several times per week.
- To be fair a bunch of this is because the CEO after Nat Friedman (Thomas Dohmke) was pushed out in August 25.
- And a ton of the top end ruby staff have left. Many of them ended up at shopify. There is a growing about of non ruby/rails code at github, but most of the system that people think of when they think github are ruby/rails.
- Who was also the last CEO, right? Is this a coincidence?
- How fast was Skype?
- MSFT acquired Skype in 2011, so I would say only a few months:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s...
- Every day more Microsofty...they should rename to "Your Repository Needs To Restart To Apply Updates"
- It's now safe to turn off your expectations.
- I wonder what the average career tenure of the userbase here is now, because Github was slow and flaky well before Microsoft got involved.
Maybe it wasn't as noticeable when Github had less features, but our CI runners and other automation using the API a decade ago always had weekly issues caused by Github being down/degraded.
- "It looks like you're trying to develop some software.
Would you like help?
- Get help with developing the software
- Just develop the software without help
[ ] Don't show me this tip again"
- Would you like to setups repository backups with OneDrive?
- Down? No sir we are not down. There are elevated error rates and degraded performance.
- The update to .NET framework went badly and we need to reinstall Windows.
- An isolated group of customers are experiencing elevated error rates and degraded performance.
FTFY. (I've read AWS word it like that)
- Technucally a set is a subset of itself.
- Does anyone else ever think "that code I just pushed into my repo just took down all of github..." whenever it goes down around the same time you sync your changes?
- I'm just going to stand by until Microsoft is back in everyone's good graces again by releasing some oss software that we all swoon over
- You've been here before!
- I'm glad I moved over to forgejo. Being selfhosted, the UI loads faster. Most importantly, the thing is always responsive.
- As a developer working on Forgejo -- glad you like it!
- It hosts all the repositories backing applycreatures, we ran dozens of git projects on the same instance, have teams, you guys did a phenomenal work. I would say it's even easy to customise.
https://foja.applycreatures.com
Edit: it has a wonderful API so I posted the link it may tempt some to ditch MS/Azure hub.
- They invented the perfect solution to stop supply chain attacks.
- Microslop at it again
- Oh, they've gone beyond micro. It's Macroslop now!
- Please don't use that term; it makes them look bad :p /s
- Setting up a Gitea instance is approachable, especially with agent assistance.
- github is at one nine, basically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47428035
- I once worked at a place with more micro services than engineers. We joked about "we have as many 8s of uptime as you need!"
- > I once worked at a place with more micro services than engineers.
Currently consulting somwhere with 30 services per engineer. I cannot convince them this is hell. Maybe that makes it my personal hell.
- "Its like family here!"
In that every night you're playing murder mystery, and its never fun.
- Oooof that's rough.
One strategy to convince is to get someone less technical than you to sit by you while you try and trace everything from one error'd HTTP request from start to finish to diagnose the problem. If they see it takes half a day to check every call to every internal endpoint to 100% satisfy a particular request sometimes that can help.
Also sometimes they just think "this is a bunch of nerd stuff, why are you involving me?!" So it's not foolproof.
- Oh, my non-technical boss agrees with me already. It's actually the engineers who've convinced themselves it's a good setup. Nice guys but very unwilling to change. Seems they're quite happy to have become 'experts' in this mess over the last 5-10 years. Almost like they're in retirement mode.
The real solution is probably to leave, but the market sucks at the moment. At least AI makes the 10-repos-per-tiny-feature thing easier.
- seven nines? That's nothing , bro we got twelve eights!
- From five nines to nine fives
- 9% ? /s (though To be honest I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if things go down so bad too at this point either)
- Unironically, I think 9% uptime would be "one-tenth of a nine".
- Are you saying 9.999% isn’t four nines?
- Can’t tell if this is intended as humor, but I LOL’ed.
- It unarguably is.
- 90% would be one 9 following the sequence back.
99.99
99.90
99.00
90.00
- Man, a while ago I thought: "It happens often, alright, but every 2 weeks? Sounds like a slight exaggeration." But it really is every 2 weeks, isn't it? If I imagine in a previous job anything production being down every 2 weeks ... phew, would have had to have a few hard talks and course corrections.
- i once fixed a site going down several times a year with two t1.micro instances in the same region as the majority of traffic. Instantly solved the problem for what, $20/month?
Another site was constantly getting DDoS by Russians who were made we took down their scams on forums, that had to go through verisign back then, not sure who they're using now. They may have enough aggregate pipe it doesn't matter at this point
- Do your part; remind people that Github is not git. Git is decentralizable and people should know this.
- Moved to self hosted crowci instead of actions.
- At this rate it will be a matter of time before a "Github is up" parody site reaches the top of HN
- Github CEO must be on HN, right? If so, any comments?
They have not even bothered to implement entra login when they have their competitors login for years, do they even know what their product is? Or are you just a middle man for slop?
- And this is why I self host a lot of my Git stack with Gerrit...
- Or just make sure you git fetch repos into $other-place.
That helps with Git not so much issues etc.
- Yeah, I think especially Git mirrors can go a long too for maintaining availability and also for reducing load off main infra.
- Microslop
- I guess vibe coding can't solve such problem for now...
- What has changed at GitHub to cause this?
- AIpocalypse. Eaten too much Copilot dog food.
- Weird Al needs to capitalize on this whole AI/Al thing
- Perhaps even AIslopalypse.
- Looking at the status, its not one long outage, but lots of little ones, microslops if you will.
- I've been using "slopocalypse". People already know AI is responsible, but slop existed before — e.g. conventionally generated SEO spam. It's just... so much worse now.
- "Slopocalypse": yeah, I like that. Easier to pronounce too.
At any rate, it seems like GitHub is back up now, so we'll see how long that lasts.
- Microsoft Makes AI Mandatory For Employees
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2025/07/08/microsof...
- Possibly a combination of moving infrastructure to Azure, and also a significant increase in the number of PRs and commits due to Vibe-coding?
- Perhaps staff cuts having longtails? https://www.itpro.com/software/microsoft/microsoft-layoffs-h...
- Azure
- > Azure
To explain this one-word comment for those unfamiliar, see previously:
GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development (5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173
In particular:
> GitHub has recently seen more outages, in part because its central data center in Virginia is indeed resource-constrained and running into scaling issues. AI agents are part of the problem here. But it’s our understanding that some GitHub employees are concerned about this migration because GitHub’s MySQL clusters, which form the backbone of the service and run on bare metal servers, won’t easily make the move to Azure and lead to even more outages going forward.
- Vibe coding features.
- I assume this is all of the pains of going from "GHA is sorta kinda on Azure", which was a bad state, to "GHA is going full Azure", which is a painful state to get to but presumably simplifies things.
- You never go full Azure
- Their primary goal in the last year was to move to Azure. Any massive infra migration is going to cause issues.
- > Any massive infra migration is going to cause issues.
What? No, no it's not. The entire discipline of Infrastructure and Systems engineering are dedicated to doing these sorts of things. There are well-worn paths to making stable changes. I've done a dozen massive infrastructure migrations, some at companies bigger than Github, and I've never once come close to this sort of instability.
This is a botched infrastructure migration, onto a frankly inferior platform, not something that just happens to everyone.
- A.I. but that acronym can mean a number of things.
Artificial intelligence, Azure integration, many other things.
- Senior engineers/leaders getting tired of Microsoft's shit and leaving.
- looking forward to the `addressing-githubs-recent-availability-issues-3` news post
- I remember back in the early Windows XP era when things got so bad that Microsoft basically had to make a hard pivot towards security and reliability.
I think they may need to do that once again. Almost every product of theirs feels like a dumpster fire. GitHub is down constantly, Windows 11 is a nightmare and instead of patching things they're adding stupid features nobody asked for. I think they need to stop and really look closely at what they're prioritizing.
- Would be easier for them to just tell us when it’s up these days
- Remember when GitHub was cool? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
- I remember. My GitHub user ID is #5907, account created 2008-04-08T20:27:36Z. I think it is inevitable that all good things come to an end, but it's still a bummer to see.
- As do I. Mine is even earlier as well!
- Anyone else notice other Microsoft cloud services ( for instance inside azure ) with bad performance also?
I can’t be specific but we are constantly complaining.
- The Azure management UI, yes, so slowww. But the services (VMs etc) have been good.
- Can this downtime be quantified to actual monetary losses?
- I've been sitting here waiting for a critical deploy to happen via GitHub Actions (I know, hour fault, we should have left ages ago). My patience for this bullshit is gone, I'm going to be pushing very hard to get us off of GitHub entirely except for public code mirrors going forward.
Edit: oh look, their site says all good, but I still have jobs stuck. What a pile of garbage.
I'm so sick of this.
- So am I the only one thinking that maybe GitHub is succumbing to the weight of AI slop that's coming in from all the vibecoding, clawbots, and other AI workflows?
- Must be Tuesday then
- Microsoft products are so human, they stop working weekly as if they're observing some sort of sabbath ...
- That's just like your Vibe man; can you just copilot your wayout of these problems?
- Did MS finish the Hotmail transition?
- h8 github so much. ahhhhhh
- For fucks sake.
I've been considering it for a while, but I'm definitely now pitching a move away from GitHub at our organization.
- Vibe check?
- Does github not do any kind of blue/green rollouts or what
- I'm going to blame Claude Code!
- Fuck sake. Again?
Sorry, I realise this comment isn't up to HN's usual standards for thoughtfulness and it is perhaps a bit inflammatory but... look, I'd bet the majority of us on this site rely on GitHub and I can't be the only one becoming incredibly frustrated with its recent unreliability[0]?
(And, yes, I did enough basic data analysis to confirm that it IS indeed getting worse versus a year, two years, and three years ago, and is particularly bad since the start of this year.)
[0] EDIT: clearly not from looking at the rest of the comments in this discussion.
- > I realise this comment isn't up to HN's usual standards for thoughtfulness
> And, yes, I did enough basic data analysis to confirm
Perhaps you'd consider showing us that analysis? That sounds like it would make a pretty substantive, thoughtful comment.
- > consider showing us
Gaze upon the tapestry in which github paints it's failure with a thin copper red thread:
- @KaiserPro has pasted the link to someone else's heatmap, which is really good. Mine was just an Excel spreadsheet with a graph that I'd intended to write a blog about but then got demotivated on because I was too busy with other things and I saw that heatmap as well. Maybe I will do a proper write up next time GitHub has an outage and I'm blocked by it.
- My vscode slop session stopped in between. Maybe it's for the better
- At least it happened after I did my work for the day... jfc!
- GitHub goes down at least once a week as I said before. [0] thanks to Copilot, Tay.ai and Zoe chatbots wrecking the platform instead of humans maintaining it.
If there was a prediction market for when GitHub experiences an outage every week, then you would make a lot of money.
- >GitHub goes down at least once a week as I said before. [0] thanks to Copilot, Tay.ai and Zoe chatbots wrecking the platform instead of humans.
there are tens of thousands of stupid scripts hosted on github itself that have scheduled progmatic pushes or pulls to repos via cron jobs with millions and millions of users -- yeah LLMs accelerate the fire but let's not pretend that GH was some bastion of real-user-dom somehow at some point.
- Vegas should start taking bets
- You have GOT to be kidding me.
- No, got to be kidding me day is next week.
- [dead]
- [dead]
