GitHub Is Having Issues

Insert the standard comment about how git doesn't even need a hub. The whole point of it is that it's distributed and doesn't need to be "hosted" anywhere. You can push or pull from any repo on anyone's machine. Shouldn't everyone just treat GitHub as an online backup? Zero reason it being down should block development.

I would prefer we have posts when github is not having issues to cut down on noise.

A directory over SSH can be your git server. If your CI isn't too complex, a post-receive hook looping into Docker can be enough. I wrote up about self hosting git and builds a few weeks ago[1].

There are heavier solutions, but even setting something like this up as a backstop might be useful. If your blog is being hammered by ChatGPT traffic, spare a thought for Github. I can only imagine their traffic has ballooned phenomenally.

1: https://duggan.ie/posts/self-hosting-git-and-builds-without-...

In moments like this, it's useful to have a "break glass" mode in your CI tooling: a way to run a production CI pipeline from scratch, when your production CI infrastructure is down. Otherwise, if your CI downtime coincides with other production downtime, you might find yourself with a "bricked" platform. I've seen it happen and it is not fun.

It can be a pain to setup a break-glass, especially if you have a lot of legacy CI cruft to deal with. But it pays off in spades during outages.

I'm biased because we (dagger.io) provide tooling that makes this break-glass setup easier, by decoupling the CI logic from CI infrastructure. But it doesn't matter what tools you use: just make sure you can run a bootstrap CI pipeline from your local machine. You'll thank me later.

I am getting really tired of github. outages happen that's a given. but on so much stuff they don't even care or try. Github is becoming the bottleneck in my agentic coding workflows. unless I make Claude do it intelligently, I hit rate limits checking on CI jobs (5000 api requests in an hour). Depot makes their CI so much better, but it is still tied to github in a couple of annoying places.

PRs are a defacto communication and coordination bus between different code review tools, its all a mess.

LLMs make it worse because I'm pushing more code to github than ever before, and it just isn't setup to deal with this type of workload when it is working well.

Microslop ruins everything it touches.

Maybe we should turn these weekly posts into an actionable item we can use to move organizations away from this critical infrastructure that is failing in realtime.

Microslop is farting too hard on vibecoding

Is this related to Cloudflare?

I'm getting cf-mitigated: challenge on openai API requests.

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/ https://status.openai.com/

What’s interesting about outages like this is how many things depend on GitHub now beyond just git hosting. CI pipelines, package registries, release automation, deployment triggers, webhooks — a lot of infrastructure quietly assumes GitHub is always available. When GitHub degrades, the blast radius is surprisingly large because it breaks entire build and release chains, not just repo browsing.

I swear this is my fault. I can go weeks without doing infra work. Github does fine, I don't see any hiccups, status page is all green.

But the day comes that I need to tweak a deploy flow, or update our testing infra and about halfway through the task I take the whole thing down. It's gotten to the point where when there's an outage I'm the first person people ask what I'm doing...and it's pretty dang consistent....

I would so very much love to see GitHub switch gears from building stuff like Copilot etc and focus on availability

> This incident has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we addressed this issue. A detailed root cause analysis will be shared as soon as it is available.

does anyone know where these "detailed root cause analysis" reports are shared? is there maybe an archive?

I really wish Graphite had just gone down the path of better Git hosting and reviewing, instead of trying to charge me $40 a month for an AI reviewer. It would be nice to have a real first class alternative to Github

codeberg might be a little slower on git cli, but at least it's not becoming a weekly 'URL returned error: 500' situation...

I've taken to hosting everything critical like this myself on a single system with Docker Compose with regular off premises backups and a restore process that I know works because I test it every 6 months. I can swap from local hosting to a VPS in 30 mins if I need to. It seems like the majority of large services like GitHub have had increasingly annoying downtime while I try to get work done. If you know what you're doing it's a false premise that you'll just have more issues with self hosting. If you don't know what you are doing it's becoming an increasingly good time to learn. I've had 4 years of continuous uptime on my services at this point. I still push to third parties like GitHub as yet another backup and see the occasional 500 and my workflow keeps chugging along. I've gotten old and grumpy and rather just do it myself.

Happening very often lately

How reliable is githubstatus.com? I know that status pages are generally not updated until Leadership and/or PR has a chance to approve the changes; is that the case here?

Our health check checks against githubstatus.com to verify 'why' there may be a GHA failure and reports it, e.g.

Cannot run: repo clone failed — GitHub is reporting issues (Partial System Outage: 'Incident with Copilot and Actions'). No cached manifests available.

But, if it's not updated, we get more generic responses. Are there better ways that you all employ (other than to not use GHA, you silly haters :-))

In many companies I worked for, there were a bunch of infrastructure astronauts who made everything very complicated in the name of zero downtime and sold them to management as “downtime would kill pur credibility and our businesses ”, and then you have billion dollar companies everyone relies on (GitHub, Cloudflare) who have repeated downtime yet it doesn't seem to affect their business in any way.

I have a bug bash in an hour and fixes that need to go in beforehand. So of course GitHub is down.

Only on days with a "y"...

How many 9s is GitHub at now? 2?

You know that it's bad when the status page doesn't have the availability stats anymore.

I spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong with GHCR, &^$% Github.

I'm on the lookout for an alternative, this really is not acceptable.

Seems like the xkcd [1] for internet infrastructure that was posted earlier [2] should have github somewhere on it, even if just for how often it breaks. Maybe it falls under "whatever microsoft is doing"

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p204nx/ac... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230704

Lowendtalk providers who take 7$ per year deals can provide more reliability than Github at this moment and I am not kidding.

If anyone is using Github professionally and pays for github actions or any github product, respectfully, why?

You can switch to a VPS provider and self host gitea/forejo in less time than you might think and pay a fraction of a fraction than you might pay now.

The point becomes more moot because github is used by developers and devs are so so much more likely to be able to spin up a vps and run forejo and run terminal. I don't quite understand the point.

There are ways to run github actions in forejo as well iirc even on locally hosted which uses https://github.com/nektos/act under the hood.

People, the time where you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and expected basic service and no service outage issues is over.

What you are gonna get is service outage issues and lock-ins. Also, your open source project is getting trained on by the parent company of the said git provider.

PS: But if you do end up using Gitea/forejo. Please donate to Codeberg/forejo/gitea (Gitea is a company tho whereas Codeberg is non profit). I think that donating 1k$ to Codeberg would be infinitely better than paying 10k$ or 100k$ worth to Github.

So Tay.ai and Zoe are still wrecking GitHub infrastructure.

Should have self hosted.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47237018

has anyone at MS tried unplugging azure and plugging azure back in yet?

the day ends in y, water is wet. I really hate that github doesn't have any real competition. Yes, I know about gitlab, but it isnt real competition.

GitHub has been shit lately. What the fuck is going on?

Are we serious?

The appearance of a thread here is so consistent that HN needs a black-bar style indicator for GH outages that points to it.

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