This is not to say that things haven't gotten worse over time, but...

I don't think that chart shows what it seems like it shows. There were plenty of pre-2018 outages that don't show up there: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&...

An alternate interpretation of that chart is "After the microsoft acquisition, they got serious about actually tracking outages."

That said, anecdotally, it's felt much worse over the last 6 months. I'd guess it's a combination of MS-induced quality drops and AI-induced scale increases.

They're moving to Azure and had to fix up Azure first to be stable enough for GH to even consider moving.

I'm guessing its a combo of Azure still not being stable enough and a byproduct of trying to move an entire company's operations from a physical DC into a cloud while its running.

Speculation from afar: clouds are not commensurate, and high-volume cloud services are going to anchor key architectural decisions around technical benefits/realities of the cloud environment they target. Moving GitHub isn’t a tech decision, and it’s broadly a Dumb Idea.

I think GitHub is well past the complexity threshold where the reflective architecting that happens during cloud development can’t be separated from product. If the Engineers were begging for Azure it’d be one thing, but otherwise this is destabilizing churn.

I agree Azure needed a lift to even handle the job, and see the that gap as indicative of a more fundamental challenge. That change is kinda like a skeleton transplant… managements feelings and post-surgery desires don’t necessarily account for the impact and essential difficulty.

Yeah idk why they're so intent on doing this migration it seems silly and wasteful and bad for their image.

I think it is probably a combination of:

- Switching to Azure

- Adding more AI features

- Using AI more for development

- Higher load caused by AI agents

Three of those are top-down direction from MS.

Well, perhaps not as long ago (e. g. from the acquisition), but if you look at the last four weeks or so, just that part alone, you can clearly see that something is not working here. Microsoft is constantly mentioned on Hacker News and not typically in a great, praising light.

If it’s just the last 4 weeks, then I would say it seems the Microsoft acquisition had little impact on their reliability.

It seems pretty reasonable that the massive surge in AI over the past 6 months has put tremendous strain on GitHub’s infrastructure, and most of these outages are as a result of that one way or another.

That's damning. I wonder what it will look like over the next 13 months as more and more code is written by ai

Too bad Copilot's having issues and as such it will take longer for recovery.

I kind of had assumed that had already begun impacting downtime, though I guess it would be good to get some confirmation.

You know what else changed around this time?

They dropped Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on rails got a bad rap IMO.

It was maybe the epitome of the get shit done internet era, and despite AI's proported productivity gains, I actually don't think we've got anywhere close to the velocity, stability, and simplicity of the peak Rails era just coming out of those PHP days. And teams were actually way smaller than they are now even after all these AI cuts!

And even when it's "working", it isn't. See this gem: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/142308

Microslop!

It’s astonishing how bad their software is now. I guess 20 years of outsourcing and bean-counting will do that

seems like it couldve been covid instead? look closer at the months and also we need a y bar for "msft makes github do xyz"

We cannot blame December 2019 uptime on covid-19.

Seems like every week or so there's status issues. Often at what feels like the start of the week too.

Tbh, for a while GitHub didn't seem to be any more nor less reliable than prior to MS acquiring it.

But in the past year or so, it does feel like outages are becoming commonplace.

And when they introduced "Free" for everyone including teams, well I tried to warn everyone that centralizing everything to GitHub was not a good idea [0] 6 years ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

Wtf. Why is that?

They are migrating from their own datacenters to Azure

Hardly first time -- https://archive.is/KZ0sy

It's giving Hotmail in early 2000s

'coz Microsoft.