An Update on GitHub Availability

Hah, love that now they say "Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features" when 6 months ago, it was seemingly exactly the same except Azure supposedly was gonna save them:

> GitHub Will Prioritize Migrating to Azure Over Feature Development - GitHub is working on migrating all of its infrastructure to Azure, even though this means it'll have to delay some feature development.

> 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.

https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

So the currently delayed feature development is now gonna be further delayed, yet almost every week we see new features and changes, just the other day the single issues view was changed, as just one example. And it was "existential" 6 months ago yet they keep stumbling on the exact same issue today?

Even if they're focused exclusively on reliability and uptime, we get the experience that we have today, kind of incredible how a company with the resources of Microsoft seemingly are unable to stop continuously shot themselves in the foot. It's kind of impressive actually. As icing on the cake, they've decided to buy up all popular developer services then migrate them all to the same platform, great idea too.

It's kind of hard to read this with a straight face.

The unlabelled graph with big numbers on top, the priorities that don't match with what we're experiencing, and a list of things that they're doing without a real acknowledgement of the _dire_ uptime over the last 12 months....

Not enough attention is being put in the production/delivery mismatch.

GitHub is claiming they require 30x scale due to the giant increase in repository creation, PRs, commits, etc.

I have not seen a single product increase in features or quality as an end user, nor new significant products have come out in this period (other than the LLMs themselves).

Where is all this code going?

> we started working on path to multi cloud.

Is this microsoft stating that they aren't able to get acceptable reliability from Azure? (I mean, I think a lot of us have heard that, but it's interesting to hear it from microsoft themselves).

GitHub stability has been bad for me. And recently even the data they show me in the web has been unreliably.

Since yesterday, me and several colleagues noticed that the pull request lists on the website are incomplete, across many repositories. For example, on https://github.com/gap-system/gap/pulls it says "Pull requests 78" in the "tab list", but the PR list view reports "35 open" (the number 78 is correct, and confirmed by e.g. `gh pr list`)

And that despite <https://www.githubstatus.com> reporting "all systems operational".

What are we doing?

Stop subsidizing tokens now that we extracted enough training data from you and we have enough agentic junkies business to keep the flywheel going up and cut on the loss leaders. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47923357

Glad that they released some data about new repo/issues/commits over the last years. It confirms what everyone else already believed from the outside: agents are putting a lot of extra, sudden pressure on GitHub. It's like a startup that is growing exponentially, with the difference that they already have a large user base to serve - and that keeps them in the bullseye - and probably a not-so-fast-moving organization when it comes down to changes. On the other side of the coin, they also have a lot of talent, infra and money a startup might not have yet.

As a solo dev GitHub going down is scary all my code, all my history, one platform. This makes me want to keep local backups more seriously.

I can not figure out what on Earth they've done with these graphs, it almost seems like these are an artists impression of a graph.

Looking at the commit graph: Why do commits have big steps followed by slow rolloffs? Why do the steps not happen at uniform points Why do larger steps sometimes have less of a slope than smaller steps but not all the time?

Then looking at the other graphs there's completely different effects going on.

I'm biased (founder of tangled.org), but the future really should be federated forges. Host repositories on sovereign infra with global identity + federated "metadata" (issues, pulls, etc.).

Global indices for this should be trivial to spin up so availability is never a concern (we're working towards this!).

I know that I'm simplifying (probably too much), but it seems like things were fine when GitHub was still a Ruby on Rails monolith and all the rigmarole with microservices etc. only made things worse.

One thing is clear: an LLM wrote this.

This latest incident was the nail in the coffin for me. I've been on GitHub since 2012 but I'm feeling the pull to migrate out to Gitea/Forgejo. Has anybody done this recently? How'd it go?

so what they're saying is that Co-Authored-By claude@anthropic.com is overloading their systems?

and that azure cannot scale fast enough to handle the load so they're embracing multi-cloud as a company... owned by microsoft?

woah. what am I reading.

There are no words that Microsoft can use that would make me trust Microsoft.

Some interesting tid bits:

* we had to resolve a variety of bottlenecks that appeared faster than expected from moving webhooks to a different backend (out of MySQL)

* * redesigning user session cache to redoing authentication and authorization flows to substantially reduce database load.

* we accelerated parts of migrating performance or scale sensitive code out of Ruby monolith into Go.

I'd like to know what database backend they migrated to. I was also surprised to read that the migration from Ruby to a more performant language had not already been completed. I assume this is because it a large code base with many moving parts, etc.

> Vladimir Fedorov is GitHub's Chief Technology Officer .... He currently serves on the board of Codepath.org, an organization dedicated to reprogramming higher education to create the first AI-native generation of engineers, CTOs, and founders.

I think I found the issue.

I wonder if they’ll end the free lunch we’ve been having since the MS takeover. There’s been a deluge of spam and crapware projects due to the LLM wave which is visible in that graph. Can’t see them sustaining being a public dustbin for low value projects forever.

So they haven't even finished migrating from their datacenters to Azure and have now started a project to add another cloud provider ("multi cloud")? Madness.

openai, anthropic, google and a plethora of chinese models all end up pushing code into github. you can discuss whether gpt 5.5 is better than opus 4.7, but for github it doesn't matter: they'll be receiving the code no matter which llm spits it out.

amazing on one hand, quite scary on the other for github and all other forges if this continues and there is no reason why it wouldn't.

> Our priorities are clear: availability first

That's a delayed April fool's right?

> While we were already in progress of migrating out of our smaller custom data centers into public cloud, we started working on path to multi cloud. This longer-term measure is necessary to achieve the level of resilience, low latency, and flexibility that will be needed in the future.

Wild

So I gather that nobody is working on a search that stays on the current branch?

Ruby catching strays

Good chuckle out of this post, it’s crazy that neither Atlassian (Bitbucket) or Gitlab are capturing value out of this same agentic coding boom. I wish github was separately publicly traded outside of Microsoft.

Nowhere to get exposure to this

When there's a gold rush invest in checks notes jewellery makers?

Personally, I’m sympathetic. We know that GitHub did a huge amount of work over the last decade to make Git scale, which has benefited us all. These new scaling challenges are real challenges, 30x growth would be a nightmare for any system that was already pushing the limits of what was possible, I think we are being far too hard on GitHub, they deserve a little grace.

anyone who's actually worked there, could you explain why they're finding scalability and reliability so hard? naively it seems like 'repo groups', ie clusters of repositories linked by being mutual forks, would be fairly isolated for the whole git storage layer, and everything else feels pretty easily parallelisable (issues, actions, etc, modulo taking locks now and then to submit results or whatever). and given that, surely you can incrementally deploy changes across those many shards to avoid most big outages?

are there big conceptual serialisations that I've missed? is it just not well factored? was the move to Azure just a catastrophically bad idea? some other thing?

I’m pretty sure my Forgejo instance on a Raspberry Pi is outperforming GitHub reliability. It’s faster that’s for sure.

> The main driver is a rapid change in how software is being built. Since the second half of December 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply.

GitHub instability has started way before that. I understand it’s too much to ask of a trillion-dollar corporation to consider the impact of their own actions, but perhaps they should’ve thought of that before forcing LLM development down everyone’s throats.