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Why do they go down so often? Is it true that the reason is that they've incorporated too much AI without human review?
by altern8 5mo ago
Why do they go down so often? Is it true that the reason is that they've incorporated too much AI without human review?
- insanitybit 5mo agoIt's (a) they're under massively increased load because everyone's vibing up new projects these days, (b) they've been in a weird frankenstein "on azure but also we have our own control plane" state for years and they're pushing to no longer have that be the case. I don't think vibecoding at Github has much to do with it.
- altern8 5mo agoAh, yes. A lot more repos, commits, and most importantly huge PRs. That makes sense. Thank you!
- gilrain 5mo agoNo, it doesn’t. Their competition is not similarly unstable, despite existing in the same world of LLMs. Think critically.
- datsci_est_2015 5mo agoDevil’s advocate, Pareto heuristic would let us speculate that 80% of LLM traffic would be aimed directly at the largest provider, i.e. GitHub.
- gilrain 5mo agoYour speculation is that their competitors would naturally not see a commensurate increase in instability while “only” handling 20% of the same crisis? I don’t buy the excuse. I want to hitch my wagon to those “mysteriously lucky” competitors. (And have. And haven’t had similar issues to Github, since.)
- datsci_est_2015 5mo agoCompetitors would be long tail, so a different mode of traffic entirely. Maybe they get spikes that are more easily whack-a-moled than the constant hammering that GitHub receives. Tough to say as this is all speculative, though.
- porridgeraisin 5mo agoIt's probably a threshold thing isn't it? You wouldn't get 20% of the effect at 20% of the traffic. There's a step function in there somewhere.
- abejfehr 5mo agoI think it’s much more than 80%, it’s probably the default recommendation and folks who aren’t technical would just accept it. Probably closer to 95% or more
- necovek 5mo agoIsn't the relative increase more of interest? If someone was only owning 10% of the market, and they've only gotten 8% (percentage points) of the 20%-not-GH LLM-related increase, they'd still be seeing a very similar spike compared to their baseline as GitHub.
- vitally3643 5mo agoTheir competition doesn't have nearly the same scale of traffic because they don't have nearly the same scale of users or network effects. Think critically.
- ModernMech 5mo agoI started using an agent (Codex) on my repo and it went from a a few dozen clones to thousands (3383 this week). I dunno what the agents are doing to clone the repo so many times -- I'm not running 3000 agents or prompts, maybe 10 or so this week. But if this is typical, a 1000x increase in usage across the board can't be good on the system.
- 12_throw_away 5mo ago> I dunno what the agents are doing to clone the repo so many times agentic "ai" is going great
- cebert 5mo agoGitHub had a blog post about this recently. They reported a significant uptick in volume (repos created, PRs, etc.), which they attribute to AI usage and tooling.
- gilrain 5mo agoDo you really believe their competition hasn’t seen the same increase? Because their competition certainly hasn’t seen the same instability issues.
- rwmj 5mo agoThis plus in a well-designed system an increase in load might cause new jobs to stop running but shouldn't take down the whole system.
- abejfehr 5mo agoYes, I truly believe that GitHub is recommended by an LLM orders of magnitude more frequently than any other forge
- llbbdd 5mo agoWhat competition?
- dawnerd 5mo agoI’ve interviewed a lot of people and when asking about their git experience they’ve said they use GitHub. To a lot of devs they are the same thing.
- rossant 5mo agohttps://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
- cautiouscat 5mo agoMicrosoft has boasted 30% of their code written by AI.[1] However we could only guess if AI generated code is the issue or something else, or a combination of things. That being said there was a noticeable trend starting around 2022.[2] That being said they’ve also been doing a big migration to Azure. It’s likely a combination of things. 1: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-as-30percent-of-microsoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a... 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/LOMPaSv3wY https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/LOMPaSv3wY
- jampekka 5mo agoThe instability started well before vibecoding, in around 2018-2019, shortly after the Microsoft acquisition. https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/ https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591928
- chilmers 5mo agoThis gets posted every time GitHub is down. This chart is not accurate. It is based on data scraped from GitHub's status page and that data is missing historical incidents from the pre-Microsoft era.
- sarchertech 5mo agoYeah, it’s not even consistent with their own incident history. I spot checked it and consistently found incidents with downtime/elevated error rates in months listed as 100.00000% uptime on that chart.
- Gigachad 5mo agoThe unofficial and offical charts are both lying. The GitHub one ignores actual outages and the unofficial ones count minor display bugs in minor features as a “github outage”.
- sarchertech 5mo agoThe unofficial one has done that for years though so it’s useful for comparison. If you go back a few years it was regularly at 99.9% uptime.
- Gigachad 5mo agoJust vibes wise, before Microsoft acquired GitHub, they added almost no features on a regular basis. These days they are adding tons of stuff every month. When I dug in to the latest outages, they were almost all in small newer, features like all the AI stuff. The actual core GitHub platform seems much more stable than the unofficial uptime trackers propose.
- coreyh14444 5mo agoI personally trigger github actions approximately 50x more than I did prior to AI-driven developer coding and I'm not alone.
- AlienRobot 5mo agoIt could be many things. Microsoft mismanaging stuff. Azure. Vibe-coded Github. So much AI slop being committed it adds an extra burden on the servers, etc.