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GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?
- jakub_g 1mo agoPossibly inspired by: https://red-squares.cian.lol/ https://red-squares.cian.lol/
- ChrisArchitect 1mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48034587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48034587
- gen220 1mo agoHey! isgithubcooked.com is my site; I made this site in February '26, I think The contribution graph as an outage calendar idea is a commonly recurring one :). I definitely saw it somewhere else as a static asset first before I made this site.
- arlattimore 1mo agoI literally chuckled out loud when I saw the headline :D
- johnea 1mo agoOh, I thought it said "Github Outrage Tracker". I was ready to click...
- kevmo 1mo agoAn important thing to consider is how much of their uptime without incidents is not the normal working hours. Their incident-free uptime on 9-5 EST, Mon-Fri, is probably like 60%.
- perfectstorm 1mo agowhat's normal working hours? very US centric comment IMO. Europe, India, China, Latam etc. don't fall into your 9-5 EST normal working hour bucket.
- padjo 1mo agoA service like GH will still show a daily usage pattern, often with a peak somewhere around 16:00 UTC when most of the US and Europe are at work.
- boredatoms 1mo agoIm fairly certain that SWEs only exist on the US west coast
- jen20 29d agoThey would be in PST then, no?
- CoastalCoder 1mo ago> Their incident-free uptime on 9-5 EST, Mon-Fri, is probably like 60%. And it may be even worse in EDT, which is currently in effect!
- thombles 1mo agoAs a daily GitHub user in Australia I still haven’t figured out why everyone’s complaining about uptime. :)
- bushbaba 1mo agocould have been a page with a static 'Yes' and a significant portion of time it'd be accurate.
- Gander5739 1mo agoRelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2236/ https://xkcd.com/2236/
- fenio 1mo agohttps://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
- kashnote 1mo agoI think we need to have a little more sympathy for GitHub. You could justify the jabs when we could all blame any outage on the migration to Azure, but then they shared numbers around the scale they're dealing with now that everyone is constantly building and pushing with AI. I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers. Yes, they need to get this figured out, but a little sympathy goes a long way. I personally wish them the best and hope their on-call people can go back to getting normal amounts of sleep soon.
- herpdyderp 1mo ago> I think it's commendable that they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers. I don't think this is commendable at all. I give GitHub a lot of money and I'm tired of it being wasted with downtime.
- jjice 1mo agoIt's a shame that the GitHub org that we use at my job that we pay a lot of money for gets affected the same way my personal nonsense does. I don't know the architecture or any of that, but I feel like there could be (and it's not like they would've really known this until the last year or two with the massive spike) separate infrastructure for paid users/orgs vs free the same way they make the distinction with enterprise. I get the massive load changes that they are under over the last two years, but why does a bunch of vibe coded slop take down the same resources that my company pays for every single month and has for years? I imagine properly splitting that out would be an absolute headache and not worthwhile for them vs stabilizing the rest of the service, but damn it sucks when I get blocked at work because GH is down.
- tempest_ 1mo agoOur GitlabCE instance has been sitting in the racks for nearly two years with almost 100% uptime running on 10 year old xeons that have long since paid for themselves. Of course it is not free of all management but for our use case it is working. There are hiccups with the CI runners from time time but nothing major and we have another machine in another rack that serves as a backup which can be brought up ~< 20 minutes. I know companies have long since tossed their expertise for hosting their own stuff in favour of SaaS but at some point its hard to beat the up time of a single machine.
- 404mm 1mo agoIf backend GitHub services are anything like GHES then I’m surprised it even managed to scale this much.
- angry_octet 29d agoI think its nothing like the Enterprise version, which is why they hate having to maintain it, same with Atlassian and Azure/Entra AD. Once service to rule them all, and in the cloud bind them. For security reasons, I would love a low feature, carefully engineered, offline github-like system. Something tuned for agentic behaviours, with an understanding of hierarchical agent identities.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- rvz 1mo agoThey were cooked the moment they got acquired by Microsoft. This is why I foresaw that centralizing everything to GitHub was just generally a bad idea 6 years ago. [0] Now that there is no CEO of GitHub, there is no point to GitHub improving. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
- pocksuppet 1mo ago6 years is a good run. For comparison, every 6 years there's a not insignificant chance you die. A restaurant that lasted 6 years would be an outstanding success. 6 years ago the very first LLMs were a novelty toy. 6 years before that was just after HTTPS became popular. 6 years before that was about when the iPhone came out.
- JeremyHerrman 1mo ago> "GitHub has had 1125 incidents since February 2016, implying a monthly incident rate of 24" 1125 incidents / 126 months ≈ 8.9 incidents per month, not 24 still terrible, but why such an obvious error in the first sentence...
- 4petesake 1mo agoProb used Copilot to write the excel formula...
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 1mo agoNot sure whether it has been updated since your comment, but the sentence now reads: GitHub has had 1125 incidents since March 2016. Over the last 3 months, they've averaged 24 incidents per month edit: although they also have 1.2 days of downtime (in a day) for their 'worst days' of downtime table, which suggests some auto number crunching is not working as expected.
- gen220 1mo agoYes I tweaked it! The number and copy were mismatched and are no longer! That worst day is likely an overlapping incidents accounting issue; I tried to account for overlapping incidents in another view but probably failed to port it over there. Should be fixed soon!
- stevage 1mo ago> GitHub has had 1125 incidents since March 2016. Over the last 3 months, they've averaged 24 incidents per month (↓ 5% vs prev 3mo). Looks like they fixed it already
- graypegg 1mo agoAhhh, I think the author mixed up two values here. That value seems to actually be the average over the past 3 months. const incidents = e.detail.incidents; // ...snip... const now = new Date(); const threeMonthsAgo = new Date(now); threeMonthsAgo.setMonth(threeMonthsAgo.getMonth() - 3); // ...snip... var currentFreq = recentIncidents.length / 3; // <- We out here, smoking these guns with our homeboy Claude // ...snip... var earliest = null; for (var j = 0; j < incidents.length; j++) { var dd = new Date(incidents[j].started_at); // <- eventually incidents[j].started_at is "2016-03-01T07:07:37.000Z" if (!earliest || dd < earliest) earliest = dd; } // ...snip... document.getElementById('n-since').textContent = earliest ? earliest.toLocaleDateString('en-US', { month: 'long', year: 'numeric' }) : '?'; document.getElementById('n-rate').textContent = Math.round(currentFreq * 10) / 10; #n-since is going to be either march or feburary. It'll change depending on your timezone because JS's Date object always shifts the date around to match the same instant but in the system's timezone. #n-rate has nothing to do with the #n-since month, it's just the last trailing 3 months. And even then, it's sort of underbaked? It's moving the date back by 3 calendar months not taking into account differing numbers of days, so it'll under-report short months. I wouldn't trust the stats here. Edit: whoops, author updated the template while I was writing this! It now says "Over the last 3 months", though that's still calendar months.
- nightpool 1mo agoGetting rid of Actions and Copilot and other secondary services almost halves Github's incident rate: https://i.imgur.com/XPcMIFr.png https://i.imgur.com/XPcMIFr.png I'm a big fan of Github Actions and I think people are often a little too harsh on it, but it's clear that it's sad that it's come at such a high cost to the platform's stability
- Normal_gaussian 1mo agoActions aren't secondary to most paid GH users; and if they are down it usually means no deployments and no tests, which can often halt work.
- isityettime 1mo agoGitHub Actions is really, really badly designed. The security model is fundamentally broken, the YAML hell is as bad as any, the log streaming lags like hell, they charge self-hosted runners for using their coordination plane, jobs queuing is really slow, and their software for actually running jobs is cursed and designed in a way that is practically hostile to self-hosting. GitHub Actions is god-awful. Have you ever used any other CI tools?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- idkasam 1mo ago[dead]
- nightpool 1mo agoYes, I was actually a part-time Jenkins admin back in high school and college. I use CircleCI more than Actions most of the time (and used Travis before that), especially for higher cost workflows, but there's no beating Actions in terms of its ease of setup and ecosystem advantage. It's way easier to just set up a simple JS file that runs on every commit in Actions compared to anywhere else. Would be happy to be proven wrong!
- electroly 29d ago
- GrumpySciGuy 1mo agoYes, but I did not need to look at the tracker to know that.....
- djieidj283 1mo agoIt’s ironic that the SCM that 2026 software engineers landed on, is one with a complicated distributed usage model and is slow/down because of a centralised service
- chanux 1mo agoApparently it's not exactly git side of GitHub that's failing. It's all the bells and whistles bolted on later causing the trouble.
- Fuzzwah 1mo agoNear the end of the 8.5 years that I worked at GitHub as an enterprise support engineer, I asked in an all hands if a "GitHub Classic" product had been considered. Much like World of Warcraft Classic, I imagined it would be a rewrite focused on matching the simpler feature set of the past. I was basically given the same response that blizzard gave that question; "you think you want that but you don't".
- kigiri 29d agoFun idea, I mean, I use old.reddit.com, would probably use classic.github.com too... Imagine YouTube Classic...
- stephenway 29d agonice old.reddit.com, but I don’t think people want something as far back as 2015, they just want their forge to stay boring and fast
- ultrarunner 29d agoFrankly, even if it was limited only to videos contemporary to whichever point we decided is "classic", I'd still be in.
- luisfmh 29d agoMaybe off topic, but I'm very sad old.reddit.com is now forcing login. Have pretty much stopped using reddit since they did that.
- joshuahedlund 1mo agoGiven that the outages are caused by record traffic, so far they are only cooked in the Yogi Berra sense of “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”
- Bratmon 1mo agoMany people think we're on the path to having separate webs for AIs and humans. This may be the beginning of that.
- bluefirebrand 1mo agoAs much as I would like that to happen, I don't think it is at all possible until we solve the "is a human" problem.
- majormajor 1mo agoRandom AI slop code pushers don't pay the bills. Traffic isn't revenue. I've started suggesting to my CTO that we move to something else because we do pay the Github bills and yet we are also affected by other people's activity. Avoiding that is not a hard engineering problem for an alternative. A world where a record amount of code is pushed to GH but a large amount of paying customers leave would be "cooked"
- olyjohn 1mo agoYeah I don't feel bad for Microsoft, but I don't feel bad for people who keep paying them for it either. This has been going on forever now. Nothing will happen until people start leaving. I don't honestly understand why so much shit is on GitHub when there are so many alternatives, anyways. It's fucking git! Can't people do or try anything different, ever?
- pocksuppet 1mo agoPeople are on GitHub because it's the cool thing to do, and there is no concept of anything else that could matter.
- _heimdall 1mo agoI feel for the team having to deal with these problems at github today. Its also beyond me how those in charge for years wouldn't have seen this coming. Github was bought by Microsoft, whether they wanted to acknowledge that internally or not. Microsoft went deep on LLMs, and specifically on LLMs for coding use cases. They must have recognized that LLM generated code and PRs would effectively DDoS GitHub. I can only assume they simply didn't care, likely driven by greed.
- xyzzy_plugh 1mo agoIs GitHub Cooked? Decidedly yes. Migrating to something else has been raised as a concern during every engagement with clients and prospective clients in the past year. "Do you use GitHub?" "Yes though we'd like to move to something else, we just don't know what yet." As soon as the next big thing shows up, they're done. And they know it.
- Bratmon 1mo agoI wonder if this is a Microsoft Excel situation where everyone 1. Hates the status quo 2. Only uses a handful of the 10,000 features the status quo has 3. Uses a different handful than everyone else Because that model kept Excel as the center of buisnesses around the world for 30 years and counting
- jeremyjh 1mo agoPeople don't hate Excel. Well - maybe programmers who don't use it hate it. In reality, Excel is the only reason Microsoft still exists. Excel is how they lure you in. Excel really is the best spreadsheet, its the only one every doc you are sent works with, but also the one people know inside and out. And if you are into Pivot tables, PowerQuery, etc there is just no escaping it. You are utterly stuck. But here is how they get you: its not much more to rent the whole office suite compared to just Excel. And as long as you are into it that far, Outlook and Teams are much cheaper than GSuite + Slack. And still...okish? No, not really. But we pretend. And it wouldn't happen without Excel.
- fulafel 1mo agoMicrosoft has many products that people hate but are still the reason why they exist (eg Windows, Teams, Sharepoint etc).
- devy 1mo agoDidn't GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov just posted this a couple days ago? https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17...
- fishfasell 1mo agoMy first thought today seeing GH actions were degraded was "some good those 3 million cores did"
- tdg5 1mo agoI’ve reached the point where I just feel a mourning kind of sadness for GitHub
- flyingshelf 1mo agoI feel that way for open source and programming in general. I don’t think it's going to be a thing anymore in just a couple of years. Even now I see people already don't look at any of the code they release.
- imnes 1mo agoIt's not making headlines, but Google and Apple seem to be getting hammered by AI as well. Getting app updates approved to release on prod on Play Store / App store used to take days, now it's taking weeks.
- xyst 1mo agoNow add an rss/atom feed link and you have my support
- sitzkrieg 1mo agousing github in 2026 is a self own. its that simple at this point
- microcantanymor 1mo agoWhat most people don't understand is that Microsoft can no longer engineer a technology product, they simply can't develop anything anymore. They can throw slop around, but they lack the corporate culture to actually build an innovative technology product. They can purchase other companies that have built products, but as soon as they do those products stop innovating and begin dying.
- microcannot 1mo agoWhat most people don't understand is that Microsoft can no longer engineer a technology product, they simply can't develop anything anymore. They can throw slop around, but they lack the corporate culture to actually build an innovative technology product. They can purchase other companies that have built products, but as soon as they do those products stop innovating and begin dying.
- silver92bullet 1mo agoI hear the comments that state we should have sympathy for github. For the individual ops/sre I can have that sympathy because it must a heck of a time internally to manage things. I can't however have sympathy for company itself. They have not set themselves or the community for success. I think it is the responsibility of the company to anticipate the issues or at least react in a way that would build trust. The fact is there is a systemic issue in the company that causes the repeated unreliableness and they have not rooted it out.
- crossroadsguy 1mo agoBut after exploring some options for small but private and personal repos (not foss; not yet at least) I realised I am better off with a free Github private repo. There simply isn't a feasible free alternative for such a use-case without hitting, often a 50MB to say few 100s MB, the limit ASAP. There's gitlab.com, bitbucket (? haven't opened it in ages) but those are not better in any way for use cases like mine. Are there any?
- arccy 1mo ago> free you are the problem
- crossroadsguy 1mo ago> > free > you are the problem Hey, arccy. What a pathetic one-liner reply! (update: since it was being downvoted anyway, removed the explanations part and just left the pissed off longer knee jerk reaction response to another shorter knee jerk reaction) Coming back to your pathetic quip: what kind of piece of work one has to be to reply in this somewhat apple-fanboi-esque way (where someone says "how to fix X problem in Y" and pat comes the reply "why not just buy Y-latest, it's just $349") and what kind of unidimensional world you live in where you believe someone wanting some free and private git hosting is the problem? Ffs. So again and with all due respect, please shut the fuck up! Because you don't know me, you don't know where I am coming from, you don't know the why, and you don't come across as someone who would ask or even care about knowing.
- owebmaster 1mo agoHis one-liner was terrible but it made you waste so much of your time getting angry, which is what feed the trolls.
- phplovesong 1mo agoThere is alternatives for github, but all of them would be offline 100% is they got even 10% of traffic Github gets after AI. Any dev can just have their own git mirror and work there, but replacing github is not really feasable, not one of the other services come even close. If github is down for say 2h i dont really care. I can live with that. IF i did care i would just host my own.
- erlkonig 1mo agoSince when does Microsoft owning a thing actually improve that thing?
- kpres62 1mo agoMaybe it's time we start HitGub
- kuuuzya 1mo agoOh, nice, but whats the difference with their own tool?
- aussiedude 1mo agogithub.com expires in 44 days github.com's SSL certificate expires in 34 days. Will either cause an outage next month?
- classified 1mo agoIf you just need a place to host your stuff, GitHub may be good enough. But for an organization that requires a workflow it is utterly inadequate. MS is trying to catch two hares at the same time, which has never worked: Slop hosting for the masses and workflow provider for the relatively few. You can't have both. But MS won't make the hard decision. Those who need workflow are on their own to find alternatives.
- kevinprk 1mo agoGitHub surely has some problems with keeping up on the influx of the traffic but the frequency of the incident is too high.
- Khaine 29d agoMaybe they should bring back the meritocracy rug
- SaudAljuaid 29d agoThe enterprise vs free‑tier tension is real. Scaling for unpredictable AI traffic must be rough. Interesting to read everyone’s perspectives here.