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GitHub's Historic Uptime
- zja 6mo agoPR merging broken right now https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/ml7wplmxbt5l https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/ml7wplmxbt5l
- _air 6mo agoDo we have metrics for the uptime of other major services? Would be interesting to see if this is just a GitHub problem or industry-wide.
- verdverm 6mo agoBitbucket Cloud incident history: https://bitbucket.status.atlassian.com/history https://bitbucket.status.atlassian.com/history Though I will be the first to say I don't fully trust it based on the flakey git clone errors we see in CI.
- josefritzishere 6mo agoThat's pretty stark.
- BadBadJellyBean 6mo agoI feel like by now GitHub has a worse downtime record than my self hosted services on my single server where I frequently experiment, stop services or reboot.
- agilob 6mo agoIt's ok because we're still paying for it. QoS degradation is worth it. No need to have 99.999% then you can have 90.84% and still people to pay for it.
- verdverm 6mo agoThose electricity savings can better used to fuel the token bonfire
- marcosdumay 6mo agoIt does have a worse downtime record than my tiny VPS that has a recurrent packet routing problem and keeps going offline. Measurably so.
- hrmtst93837 6mo ago[flagged]
- alberth 6mo agoUnsolicited feedback ... changing the y-axis to be hours (not % uptime) might be more intuitive for folks to understand. The data is there, you just have to hover over each data point.
- simlevesque 6mo agoIt could even be both % and offline hours per year. To me the percentage is simpler to understand.
- dewey 6mo agoI remember a lot of unicorn pages back in the days. Maybe the status page was just not updated that regularly back then?
- imglorp 6mo agoI think the unicorn is only for web pages. Things like git api services might be broken independently (and often are!) and they might show up on the status page after some time.
- mcherm 6mo agoThe significance of the changeover would be much more impactful if the chart showed a longer history.
- rvz 6mo agoI guess "centralizing everything" to GitHub was never a good idea and called it 6 years ago. [0] Looking at this now, you might as well self host and you would still get better uptime than GitHub. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
- DerArzt 6mo agoThis has to feel a little vindicating.
- SamuelAdams 6mo agoIt could also be that they have more customers / clients now, or offer more capabilities.
- phillipcarter 6mo agoFWIW if people are looking for a reason why, here's why I think it's happening: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-azure-over-feature-development/ https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
- nmaleki 6mo agoYou'd think they'd do all the testing elsewhere and use a much shorter window of time to implement Azure after testing. I don't think this fully explains over 6 years of poor uptime.
- hadlock 6mo agoThe fact that even they struggle with github actions is a real testimate to the fact that nobody wants to host their own CD workers.
- esseph 6mo ago> The fact that even they struggle with github actions is a real testimate to the fact that nobody wants to host their own CD workers. What a weird takeaway
- phillipcarter 6mo agoIt certainly explains the issues _now_, IMO.
- llama052 6mo agoIt's absolutely this. Our Azure outages correlate heavily with Github outages. It's almost a meme for us at this point.
- honeycrispy 6mo agoAzure's downtime doesn't appear to be as bad as Github's.
- mholt 6mo agoEven better IMO is this status page: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ "The Missing GitHub Status Page" with overall aggregate percentages. Currently at 90.84% over the last 90 days. It was at 90.00% a couple days ago.
- skipants 6mo agoThese are two pages telling two different things, albeit with the same stats. The information is presented by OP in a way to show the results of the Microsoft acquisition.
- montroser 6mo agoIt has been pretty rough. Their own numbers report just a single `9` for Actions in Feb 2026 with 98% uptime. But that said -- I don't get the 90% number. Anecdotally, it seems believable that 1 in 50 times (2%) in Feb that Actions barfed. Which is not very nice, but it wasn't at 1 in 10 times (10%).
- verdverm 6mo agoIt looks like the aggregate stats are more of a venn diagram than an average. So if 1/N services are down, the aggregate is considered down. I don't think this is an accurate way to calculate this. It should be weighted or in some way show partial outages. This belief is derived from the Google SRE book, in particular chapters 3 (embracing risk) and 4 (service level objectives) https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/ https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/ https://sre.google/sre-book/service-level-objectives/ https://sre.google/sre-book/service-level-objectives/
- mort96 6mo agoI mean I think it's useful. It answers the question, "what percentage of the time can I rely on every part of GitHub to work correctly?". The answer seems to be roughly 90% of the time.
- 6mo ago
- shrinks99 6mo agoI got Claude to make me the exact same graph a few weeks ago! I had hypothesized that we'd see a sharp drop off, instead what I found (as this project also shows) is a rather messy average trend of outages that has been going on for some time. The graph being all nice before the Microsoft acquisition is a fun narrative, until you realize that some products (like actions, announced on October 16th, 2018) didn't exist and therefore had no outages. Easy to correct for by setting up start dates, but not done here. For the rest that did exist (API requests, Git ops, pages, etc) I figured they could just as easily be explained with GitHub improving their observability.
- irishcoffee 6mo agoGithub actions needs to go away. Git, in the linux mantra, is a tool written to do one job very well. Productizing it, bolting shit onto the sides of it, and making it more than it should be was/is a giant mistake. The whole "just because we could doesn't mean we should" quote applies here.
- psini 6mo agoBut GitHub actions is not Git?
- irishcoffee 6mo agoSorry yes, that was my point. GitHub turned git into some dysmorphic DVCS version of c++ on the web. Git is fine. Maybe 10% of people use plain git, it’d all wrapped in shitty web apps. Let git be git, and let ci/cd be ci/cd, the way Linux intended. However, I don’t work on web apps. Maybe it’s better for the JavaScript folks. I hope to never write a line of js in my lifetime.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 6mo agoThe same philosophy would suggest that running some other command immediately following a particular (successful) git command is fine; it is composing relatively simple programs into a greater system. Other than the common security pitfalls of the former, said philosophy has no issue with using (for example) Jenkins instead of Actions.
- yakkomajuri 6mo agoI mean I'm as annoyed as the next person about the outages but I'm not sure correlating with the Microsoft acquisition tells the whole story? GitHub usage has been growing massively I'd imagine?
- bob1029 6mo agoI'm convinced one of my org's repos is just haunted now. It doesn't matter what the status page says. I'll get a unicorn about twice a day. Once you have 8000 commits, 15k issues, and two competing project boards, things seem to get pretty bad. Fresh repos run crazy fast by comparison.
- fishtoaster 6mo agoIs the pre-2018 data actually accurate? There seem to have been a number of outages before then: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1456531200&page=0&prefix=true&query=github%20outage&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&... Maybe that's just the date when they started tracking uptime using this sytem?
- OlivOnTech 6mo agoData comes from the official status page. It may be more a marketing/communication page than an observability page (especially before selling)
- pikzel 6mo agoThe status page was often down when GH was down, back in the days.
- xiaoyu2006 6mo agoAha we need a status page of status page.
- tibbon 6mo agoI could imagine a leadership or viewpoint change in how they reported when/what was down. I've seen so many times where Company A will complain that their vendors aren't accurate enough about uptime and how Company A notices first that their vendors are down, but then they themselves have a very laggy or inaccurate status page. We want our vendors to be accurate to the minute on these, but many CTOs don't care to admit when they too have problems.
- robshippr 6mo agoThis at least makes me feel like I am not going crazy when I say "Github used to be much more reliable before Microsoft bought them"
- starkparker 6mo agoThe biggest spikes are Github Actions, starting November 2019. They didn't go GA until November 13, 2019: https://siliconangle.com/2019/11/13/github-universe-announcements-bring-bevy-updates-developers/ https://siliconangle.com/2019/11/13/github-universe-announce...
- theaicloser 6mo ago[flagged]
- hk__2 6mo agoIt’s biaised to show this without the dates at which features were introduced. A lot of the downtimes in the breakdown are GitHub Actions, which launched in August 2019; so yeah what a surprise there was no Actions downtime before because Actions didn’t exist.
- voxic11 6mo agoCheck the breakdown page. Like yes the magnitude is reduced obviously for individual services. But they all show the same trend.
- hk__2 6mo agoI checked the breakdown page, as I wrote: > A lot of the downtimes in the breakdown are GitHub Actions
- cuu508 6mo agoYou can click on "Breakdown" and then on "Actions" to hide it.
- mbauman 6mo agoEven worse, those features show "100% uptime" pre-existence on the breakdowns page too.
- siruwastaken 6mo agoThis is the real questionable part of the graphic. It seems that no-data pre 2018 was just considered 100% uptime (which is hardly historically accurate).
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- fontain 6mo agoGitHub is 100x the size today with 100x the product surface area. Pre-Microsoft GitHub was just a git host. Now, whether GitHub should have become what it is today is a fair question but to say “GitHub” is less stable today vs. 10 years ago ignores the significant changes. Also, much of these incidents are limited to products that are unreliable by nature, e.g: CoPilot depends on OpenAI and OpenAI has outages. The entire LLM API industry expects some requests to fail. GitHub’s reliability could stand to be improved but without narrowing down to products these sort of comparisons are meaningless.
- tln 6mo agoThe article provides a way to do just that - click breakdown then you can deselect any product areas. Just the Git operations show way more instability post acquisition.
- bigfatkitten 6mo ago> Pre-Microsoft GitHub was just a git host. And even just that aspect of the service is now extremely unreliable. If outages in the LLM side can cause that to break, that would indicate some serious architectural problems.
- davebren 6mo agoSites are supposed to get more reliable as they grow and have more resources to allocate specifically towards site reliability.
- darkhorn 6mo agoWhen I say that Microsoft writes very bad code some people get offended. For example for Azure Event Hubs they have almost no documentation and Java libraries that mostly do not run.
- qrush 6mo agohot take: I would accept ads under every PR comment in GitHub if we could get back to 3 or 4 nines of reliability.
- verdverm 6mo agoI will chime in that Jira and Bitbucket have drastically improved performance and reliability over this same time period. It actually feels snappy and they seem to listen to feedback.
- redwood 6mo agoI wonder if they got moved to Azure in 2019?
- Jaco07 6mo ago[dead]
- tonymet 6mo agoNearly all the variance is from Actions, a product that didn’t exist beforehand. It’s despicable to see everyone punching down on GitHub. Even under Microsoft they’ve continued to provide an invaluable and free service to open source developers . And now , while vibe coders smother them to death, we ridicule them . Shameful , really
- BitsAndObjects 6mo agoI was with you until your comment about vibe coders. Microsoft paid for and brought this vibe coding hell upon themselves. GitHub Copilot, investment in/partnership with OpenAI, and everything else they’ve done to enshitify software and the internet. If it brings them down, they’ve only themselves to blame. More likely it’ll just hasten the end of free public repos, which will be a shame, but we’ll find other ways to share code that aren’t reliant on one semi-benevolent megacorp.
- tonymet 6mo agoThe smothering would happen with or without Copilot. This just sounds like an excuse to be ungrateful . I hope GitHub shuts down free tier , maybe developers will finally be grateful .
- BitsAndObjects 6mo agoI’m grateful for GitHub and their support for open source, but they’re not getting any sympathy for the AI mess they’re generating (and they’re contributing more to the mess than many other organisations, due to their size, position and product strategy). They’re a big enough corporation that we can have nuanced feelings about them. Simultaneously grateful for one part of what they do, and unsympathetic for the consequences of a different part of what they do.
- tonymet 6mo agotrue colors.
- llama052 6mo agoNearly every time Github has an outage, Azure is having issues also. Actually the last 4-5 outages from Github, Our Azure environments have issues (that they rarely post on the status page) and lo and behold I'll notice that Github is also having the same problem. I can only assume most of this is from the Azure migration path. Such an abysmal platform to be on. I loathe it. Looks like there's an internal service health bulletin: Impact Statement: Starting at 19:53 UTC on 31 Mar 2026, some customers using the Key Vault service in the East US region may experience issues accessing Key Vaults. This may directly impact performing operations on the control plane or data plane for Key Vault or for supported scenarios where Key Vault is integrated with other Azure services. Honestly all of the key vault functions are offline for us in that region. Just another day in paradise. Also the fact that the azure status page remains green is normal. Just assume it's statically green unless enough people notice.
- wiseowise 6mo agoProgramming is a solved problem, btw.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- otterley 6mo agoI'm not a GitHub apologist, but that graph isn't at scale, at all. It's massively zoomed in, with a lower band of 99.5%. It makes it look far worse than it is.
- verdverm 6mo agoIt's an uptime chart and shouldn't need to show much more than the 99% range. If you started the y-axis at zero, you wouldn't see much of anything. Logarithmic scale would still be a bit much imo.
- otterley 6mo ago> If you started the y-axis at zero, you wouldn't see much of anything. That's... kind of my point. As a reliability engineer, I'm disappointed in GitHub's 99.5% availability periods, especially as they impact paying customers. On the other hand, most users are non-paying users, and a 99.5% availability for a free service seems to me to be a reasonable tradeoff relative to the potential cost of improving reliability for them.
- grayhatter 6mo ago> the other hand, most users are non-paying users, and a 99.5% availability for a free service seems to me to be a reasonable tradeoff relative to the potential cost of improving reliability for them. If they are using your data, you're still paying just not in cash. As a former reliability engineer, I'm trying hard to remember back when we had multiple months in a row never reaching 100% uptime, and I can't. Yes, we've seen runs of painful months, but also runs of easy months without down time. But let's talk root cause here, the cost of improving them here, is someone caring. This isn't simply a hard problem, it's a well understood hard problem that no one who makes decisions cares about. Which as a reliability engineer is an embarrassment. Uptime is one of those foundational aspects that you can build on top of. If you're not willing to invest in something as core as your code or service works. What are you even doing?
- 6mo ago
- TimLeland 6mo agoHow much of the downtime is due to all the AI code being committed?
- barryhennessy 6mo agoIt’s actually great to see a living example of how sensitive users* are to what to a lay person would look like a small amount of downtime. The fact that we’re all talking about it, and not at all surprised, is a great example we can take when making the case for more 9’s of reliability. * well, very technical power users.
- landsman 6mo agoIt is ridiculous how company owned by Microsoft, making non sense money on Azure, is let to die like this. That's have to be a soft of plan or something. So sad to watch it.
- topbanana 6mo agoHistorical * https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/everything-youve-ever-wanted-to-know-about-historic-and-historical https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/everything-youve-eve...
- frenchie4111 6mo agoGithub's migration to Azure has so far been a hilariously bad advertisement for Azure
- jrochkind1 6mo agoHonestly I think their status page just got more honest -- and they are graphing this in such a way that any partial outage to any service looks really bad on teh chart. There were definitely partial outages to services inside that row of horizontal green dots, that the status page just wasn't advertising.
- keybored 6mo agoI think you mean GitHub’s histrionic uptime.
- 8organicbits 6mo agoI'd like to move off GitHub, and I deploy some websites using GitHub Pages, so I took a look at the availability of static web hosting; GH actually does really well on this metric, although Fastly, the CDN they use, should get the credit. https://alexsci.com/blog/static-hosting-uptime/ https://alexsci.com/blog/static-hosting-uptime/
- chenzhekl 6mo agoMy impression is that, before Microsoft acquired GitHub, GitHub went for many years without really introducing new features, so part of its stability came from the fact that it wasn’t very ambitious or proactive about improving.
- ahofmann 6mo agoI loved that time. Websites, or "apps" that don't change every second time I want to use them, are great.
- joey5403 6mo agoBased on the graphics, Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing very well
- addaon 6mo agoHistorical, not historic. Extremely not historic.
- davebren 6mo agoReminder to keep local backups of everything important while the reliability of all these services continues to degrade.
- neop1x 6mo agoPowered by Azure™