Why?

Everyone has their own copy of the gitlab remote.

Not everyone has their own copy of the project's issues/pull requests/settings/webhooks/CI config/etc., which the incident affected (and 6 hours worth were lost). Git repositories themselves do have the happy side effect that at least someone on your team has a full latest clone on their machine, but that's only because the source code is what you're there to use every day. Even if GitLab had a great "checkout your issues/etc. as a git repo" story, not many users would have an up-to-date copy backed up 100% of the time.

Right, there was data loss, and it was not trivial.

Does that mean you should only use gitlab for toy projects? I don't think so.

I think they'll quickly learn from this.

Maybe a dumb question but couldn't they be included in a hidden folder in the root of your repo or something? That way they'd get replicated automatically every time someone does a pull.

It'd probably have to be on a separate branch, but yeah they technically _could_ do that. Maybe something like this? https://github.com/duplys/git-issues

We use gitlab.com for code reviews and CI, and we basically lost a day of integration productivity because of it.

Yes, our process is too tightly tied to a single service, but it happens because we don't have the resources to self-host our own solution. We love GitLab, but this has absolutely got us looking elsewhere.

> We love GitLab, but this has absolutely got us looking elsewhere.

If you love GitLab and don't want to self host you can pay them for GitLab Hosted (paid customers had no troubles today).

How many days of productivity are you going to lose migrating off GitLab ?

And how do you ensure you're not going to have the same problem at the next place.

And what will you do if the next place people doesn't tell you the root cause of a probable similar event?

The gitlab service is obviously important to your organisation, but not important enough to pay for their service, and incidentally, support a more robust environment?

Do you self-host any services currently & have they incurred any similar unexpected downtime in the past?

If you self-hosted code reviews/CI, would you expect having a similar downtime causing problem in the future?

I expect the answer to be "Yes" for most companies.