Can't even view diffs in the web interface!
I'm out! I am willing to pay ~$5-10/mo for a reliable host I can swap as painlessly as possible. Mostly just building little static sites and little PWAs, no more than 500mb a repo and 10gb total. Need a repo with PRs and issues, where people can register free account and contribute or raise issues, GH actions CI, and pages host to deploy static sites. I don't use more than 100 mins of CI a month. Any recommendations?
edit: GitLab free tier has all I need, but I kind of want to pay and have some kind of reliability (not necessarily an SLA, but). But their next tier is $29/mo, which is too much.
- put Forgejo on a little $5 Vultr VPS (I share the VPS with other things, Forgejo doesn't need much resources. I also added some block storage to host my Docker containers in the Forgejo Docker registry)
- got a 8GB ram cheaper Hetzner VPS (you have to wait for their availability) for around 8 EUR and used that to install the CI runner
- Use Netlify for hosting static sites and PWA
It takes a bit to set up but everything works snappy, clean, and flawlessly. I have unlimited CI minutes. As a bonus I get free Docker image and registry hosting because it's included with Foregejo. I am so, so happy with it all.
Also with Forgejo you just feel like you're using something clean and solid. GitHub started to feel more and more bloated, slow, and unstable.
I don't care much about the social aspects of GitHub, but I do care a ton about hosting code for long periods of time, long after I've completely changed my personal homelab.
GitHub's most essential service for me is it being the equivalent of the Internet Archive, but for code.
just shy of 3 hours to find the issue
It's clear that updating the status page as quickly as possible isn't even something github cares about.
So a "component" failed? That sounds like a software component. We just saw in https://www.wiz.io/blog/red-agent-snowflake-copilot-cicd-bug how sloppy bot coding is.
It’s kind of a shame, because Github keeps giving me fantastic ways to toot my own horn, but I can hardly do that if I can’t improve on their numbers.
Looking at a unicorn page, I feel this lingering hope that it's transient (like it usually was in the old days) but my mind reassures me it's probably going to be a long full outage again.
The hope is dead.
But maybe I’m wrong?
The "AI is using a lot of resources" excuse was maybe acceptable last year but not in Q3 2026.
Managers and executives though? Those I do blame. Surely at this point it should be blindingly obvious their current strategy is not working.
You mean people pushing LLM assisted coding, or github's own coders pushing LLM assisted code to production ? :-).
I am more inclined to think that it is the second, but if the reason is the first, what is particular hard to scale ? It's not like everybody is vide-coding into a single repository, so I would expect that most of the load would naturally be scalable by increasing the resources. If for some reason that is not possible, I would expect a corporation as big as Github to keep the paying customers working by gracefully denying service to the free tier, not to collapse like an house of cards.
Despite minimal new features, and drastically increasing hardware resources to keep up, self-hosted GitHub enterprise went from things being instant to most requests taking many seconds. And activity on issues in one repository tends to mysteriously re-open issues with the same number in other repositories.
I think they are vibe coding and facing the consequences.
At most normal companies you monitor your systems and address potential bottlenecks before they reach a tipping point. And generally you want enough headroom that a sudden 2-3x increase in demand wouldn't take out the service.
Either Github's technical leadership/talent is completely out of their depth (seems unlikely), or they're not hiring enough engineers to work on these capacity issues.
Regarding their leadership, I'd argue the latter implies the former.
So yeah I'd say they're out of their depth.
Commit volume went from 1 billion total in all of 2025 to 275 million per week by early 2026.
Microsoft has to spend more money on acquiring games studios for billions of dollars then shut them down.
It has really just coasted on GH's network effect because everybody uses GH for git by default. It doesn't really have much direct competition and anything that does offer something like GH just doesn't have the same mindshare.
In that way, GH became more like MS.
Youtube and Insta and Facebook and many other social media platforms handle very resource intensive media for billions of people plus bots.
Increased influx from AI is not plausible when viewed from that lens.
Anyone here have data on whether the likes of gitlab have been impacted in the same was as github?
But I’m more lenient with codeberg because they are a non-profit and as you say, they are banning vibe-coded project because of the cost to infrastructure. In the meantime, GitHub is encouraging vibe-coding, multiplication of the source code, and genAI discussions.
How many hires went into infra and platform? How many went to Gen AI org units?
From what I see, and that is a constant wave of very meh features, it seems like the latter.
The original source was Kyle Daigle, GH COO.
They need to start getting rid of the free tiers for GitHub Actions and actually charge appropriately or increase prices for it.
I guess they're quite happy with that TBF, it doesn't seem like they're that interested in being a git forge anyway.
More realistically, MAU or something is a metric/OKR. It’s easy to imagine why a business wouldn’t want to cap that.
The audience will go away to somewhere you aren't. Then what?
AI makes investors/shareholders go brrr.
There's a lot of consumer surplus with the features GitHub offers. I'm sure they can have better pricing tiers to capture the surplus without losing too many users.
Seems presumptuous to assume a root case while the incident is still ongoing, no?
They’ve been having issues for a while.
I would gladly pay that fee if it means Github is reliable for paying customers.
If they make it harder to push slop on github, people might treat it as an incentive to generate less slop. Less tokens sold. Bad. Very bad.
The github paying customers are not going to move away.
Plus, it's probably genuinely hard to scale. And they can't throw compute at the problem - all compute is already going to the LLMs.
Last month, I made more commits than my entire 2025 combined.
But that discards my point, which is that you should probably have been prevented from pushing all those to github unless you were paying them for it, but you weren't because the executives running github can't admit that AI is bad for their platform.
How much more value did those commits create than in 2025?
So probably 10x more value is my guess for my entire team.
If you mean translating that into revenue, I'm not sure. Our product is better than ever with features a much bigger team couldn't dream of building before. Stability has also been better with fewer bugs, issues, downtime. When there are bugs, it gets fixed far quicker than before.
I still remember that they launched GitHub Actions in 2018 and back then I was thinking: They can't even make the website reliable, surely this will only cause them more problems.
Has big tech reached a similar status like banks in that they are "too big to fail" i.e. when they do fail we all just look the other way and say: "well everyone else is out too". Didn't someone recently calculate that GitHub is running at 95%? For comparison the Irish Rail service which is not reliable has 80% of it's trains run on time.
This seems absurd and really challenges a lot of ideas I had about big tech and cloud infrastructure. GitHub seems to have remained the dominant player relative to GitLab etc.
In my eyes it would be a ginormous gain to our colective mental health to not have the expectation to contribute to open source projects for free, or to have "green squares" every day on a public GitHub profile.
Great that it doesn't work on you, but it works really well on a depressingly large number of people.
Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.
And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).
Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.
This isn't "psyops". Sure, it's a bad side of social interactions, but when you interact with other people, there's always some of this - in person as well as online.
The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".
I have no argument that selling popularity is bad and filtering by stars is stupid, but I don't blame Github for any of that.
You could equally well assign the success of certain coders to YouTube because they came to attention by showing off their work in livestreams. Which I do not. They found a way to advertise their own success, but it's theirs.
The argument is that there's no need for that much social interaction to produce quality code, quite the contrary, the more social interaction, the more focus is lost.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but there's a reason why the Linux Kernel communication is still done through acerbic email threads.
Even if the platform itself doesn't take off, the protocol and the data ownwership (you host your repo artifacts, issues, prs, etc on your ATproto server) mean that a competitor could come in easily if you were no longer satisfied with performance, reliability, or monetization.
On the contrary, I believe it's been detrimental to the open internet and only serves to control us by the powerful.
I never trusted Github and never will.
It's a social network with github-like social features and git hosting, but you can still self host your git and have all the features like issues, PRs and so on just like GitHub.
And it's built on ATProto so you can also have your issues PRs and so on hosted on your infra, but everything interconnects nicely with your single account, just like using GitHub.
They even added a vouching system for users, to know who to trust based on who you already trusted.
This is the way. Stop centralizing everything.
https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...
Seems like it's far from production-ready and there hasn't been much activity this year?
I suppose people can use git too if they ever figure out how to send emails from a dedicated client.
You can argue that the lack of diversity in infrastructure is bad, and I wouldn’t disagree. I think we should have more projects to explore better ways of working. But, the tradeoff is that when you have a centralized system, like GitHub, you also have less friction. The learning curve is small when everything uses the same tools.
I do think GitHub has positively contributed to the software industry and open source. It’s been enshittified for sure, but it has had a golden era.
If I build something that satisfies me and say 100 users (who all star me) does that really say anything. Are those 100 stars even "real" any more?
All the old problems of the web are new again, and still remain unsolved.
some investors use stars (and star growth velocity) to determine which projects they invest or don't invest in. (not saying it's good or bad - just saying it's a real thing.)
There are many git hosting options, including some for self hosting. its a lot easier to switch to a different version control host than to a different version control system.
Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.
In comparison to SVN and other non-DVCs git did not need to continuously talk to the central server for history, "branch" creations, unlocking/locking files before changes, etc.
Linus wanted a DVCS, but they wanted centralization and licenses were expensive, so he decided to launch the git initiative where he provided scaffolding and the rest came from contributions.
EVERY other client I've ever worked with used their own gitforge or at least bitbucket...
Hell, even I do it.
Note that raw user numbers won't really cut it; if 1 million people left Twitter, it's possible that 500 000 of those people joined and 500 000 new people joined; the user numbers would look like everyone returned, but really only 50% did in this hypothetical.
Github is actually down and I can't push code right now, it's blocking my business which is unacceptable. It's a broken tool.
On Twitter, it's mostly the networking effect, you want to be where peoples are, and unless a large chunk move at once, you are stuck there.
On Github, it's the technical cost of migrating, the git part is trivial, but tickets, PR history and CI/Integration are another can of worms.
Projects which moved away, moved away for good, at most only leaving a synchronized mirror.
and this assertion is based on ... ?
Ever since the Twitter -> X rebranding, every time I open Twitter links, I have a very high chance of hitting a "Something went wrong" type page, with a retry button that just does nothing. It's been like this for ages. I barely open Twitter links anymore as a result.
This splintering should happen more often.
Why do we as software engineers have set fault tolerance and high availability as the primary goal of any software / infrastructure architecture? This shows it's completely irrelevant.
> Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 429 (Too Many Requests).
> Warning: Back off 19.714 seconds before retry.
> Warning: Failed to download action 'https://codeload.github.com/'.
> Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 502 (Bad Gateway).
> Warning: Back off 22.228 seconds before retry.
> Error: Response status code does not indicate success: 429 (Too Many Requests).
> Error: Failed to download archive 'https://codeload.github.com/' after 3 attempts.
Nice - even their own action runners are getting rate limited atm
Gathered details on embedding request syntax from
Unicorn! · GitHub
No idea if/when we decide to pull that bandaid but I think once we can't merge a hot fix into main because of GH being down, it'll be a big org push to replace it.
What's everyone else using? Self hosted Gitlab? Gitea?
Did you have the conversation "do we need to move from $whatever CI/CD to GitHub Actions?" beforehand? What were the arguments in favour?
- It was believed that GitHub would be more reliable than our self hosted Gitlab CI runners. This has proven to be very false.
- It was believed it would be easier to write tooling. I’m not on the dev tooling team, so can’t confirm if they found it true or not, but from the outside I see a lot more “Github can’t do that” than I did “Gitlab can’t do it”
Why is it hilarious to believe that the industry leader might be better at something than doing it yourself?
Frontier labs and global saas heavyweights run CI through us, plus a crop of open source tooling like Bazel, vLLM, Firecracker, Rails, Ray, Sorbet and Rust.
Shopify, Uber, Airbnb, Canva stresstested the platform ten years ago for scaling issues.
You need to take a little time to design upfront and take advantage of dynamically programmable primitives. It isn't the same ease/convenience as Actions. Bit more available though.
steps:
name: Do the thing
run: nix build .#
tangled.org!
Tangled.org really been working to ensure all their features work from data hosted on your personal data server (it's based on ATproto) which means should their performance, reliability, or monetization ever get you down it's easy to switch to a competitor since you're not locked in.
Cost as always depends on your usage, but it will likely be less than your current cost of GitHub Actions.
Not if you want to make sure it compiles and works on Windows (which you don't have) or macOS (which you don't have and can't emulate). That's something github gives for free, and for me, it's the only reason to stay on github for small/tiny free software projects (at least as a secondary host).
they've had multiple outages in the last week, so i guess they are proving themselves correct.
in practice, giving ssh/sudo to AI (codex) and telling it to setup ephemeral self-hosted runners on your own host VM (qemu), takes about 30 minutes and works extremely well. it bangs out all the shell scripts. moved my own business over to it. zero problems.
you might even find it is kind of neat too. you can customize your VM with software pre-installed. speeds up your builds quite a bit.
[0] https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/blacksmith-seed-announcement
I mean, that plus better uptime.
See: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
Our runners are faster, our CI is smoother than ever. Transitioning was a matter of a few hours, which we took as a fun hackaton.
Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t), go hit the gym or walk outside.
If a work tool going down triggers you enough mentally to start angrily ranting online, it’s a sign you need to chill out and focus more on your health
My significant other was just let go from their job as a scapegoat for an organizational error: 3 layers of failure - IC, manager, director, and the IC was let go. The error caused a 7 figure loss for the company that has 10 figures of revenue per year. The manager and director may not see any consequences, though the director will probably be forced out by end-of-year due to incompetence. The new executive has taken to firing employees much more eagerly than their predecessor, like some sort of Jack Welch acolyte.
Their firing has put a lot of things into perspective for me. Mostly, fuck "at-will" employment and its negative effect on the American social contract.
But also this "angry ranting" online that the original poster was referencing. Not everyone has the privilege to calmly respond to things that directly impact their livelihood.
- Have never seen it mentioned on this forum, in any context.
- We're potentially pursuing legal action.not to mention that any business which could potentially lose enough money that they would need to let go of developers from a github outage should probably already have some business continuity plans in place.
It all ties back to the OP, where the issue you've might not be as bad as you think. I have been in situations where we have dropped all procedures to push a hot fix because we were actively bleeding money, and in situations where you know there is an issue, and you let it be.
Maybe I pay for a service and I want that service to work consistently during core business hours.
With every single of these enterprise 'cloud' offerings you are giving (almost) complete power over your business/project to somebody else who couldn't care less about your success or failure, you are simply irrelevant for them. I see it at work too, every time critical external systems go down whole bank stops still, just because few bucks were saved yearly on some on-prem servers.
Look at it this way, you are learning some important lesson today and finding great area of improvement for resiliency from now on.
It's not all that different from, say, an AWS region having a service impact. People would rather complain about AWS than prepare and utilize a well-tested recovery plan to shift to a standby region. Oftentimes there's no fallback plan because the business already considered it and decided it was too costly relative to the benefit, but when the incident happens, they still can't help but complain. Humans being humans.
I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.
However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...
But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house.
And I don't think that GitHub is devoid of SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
The issue is that they're not achieving two nines uptime in practice.
I sympathized with them when they said this a handful of months ago, but then I saw this [0] page that shows how it's been shot for years prior (which tracks with my memory).
I feel for the GH engineers that have to deal with this, especially the SREs. I also don't hate the downtime right now, as I'll make a cup of coffee and do something else. I will say though, I did have a hotfix a week or so ago during the Actions outage, which really was a pain.
You're right that getting angry and ranting isn't the right reaction here, but I do no give them the LLM load excuse. I don't give them an out for having awful uptime during work hours for a product we pay quite a bit for as an org.
Or, maybe your #1 IT priority was moving everything to Azure instead ;)
This is the outcome of violating single responsibility principle in business.
Edit: it seems GHE is also affected by the outage and isn't much better.
- we are getting no benefit beyond getting excuses replies to our emails - right or wrong, but we depend heavily on GitHub actions so this has a very real impact on us
There is no separate enterprise platform unless you buy their self hosted server product.
Which means they have a pricing problem. Rate limit non-paying users.
It's absurd that I have dozens of repos, many with GH Actions that run CI, test and then package and push to prod/package managers, and haven't paid GH anything.
The idea that we should be fine with this unreliability is just amazing. It's not a mental health issue to have problems when important infra fails.
the comment doesnt say you should be "fine" with the unreliability.
they are saying people shouldnt get so emotionally worked up over it. which, while i wouldn't phrase it in the way the parent did, i agree with the direction of their point.
"Github’s servers are constantly on fire as their usage increased something like 50x due to LLM sloppers pushing large amounts of trash code"
"Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t), go hit the gym or walk outside." with assumptions like above.
If it was, "hey they f*ed up but there's no point having an overly emotional reaction" that would be fine. But he seems to be justifying this. Especially with Github's record up to now of unreliability I think it's completely fair to be annoyed.
No qualifiers necessary. But try arguing with a lawnmower...
Which they encouraged by pushing Copilot down everyone's throat
Is this rage bait? Isn't Google, Amazon, and all the other services in the world similarly impacted by LLM's? Isn't Claude, OpenAI, etc.? Why can they handle the load but not Github?
If they are facing an influx of commits from bots maybe they need to start metering commits from those accounts and charge them money.
This is a self imposed problem.
They could easily tighten things up in that regard, and make a choice that is right for their main users at the expense of The MS corpo mandate/mission. It is a choice to do otherwise.
Github and their parent company are active participants in pushing LLM-driven coding.
However, your "(you don't)" comment is not going to calm down all the people, who, you know, DO have a hotfix to push now, and DO have an angry customer that could not care less for which part of our infrastructure is breaking _their_ workflow.
The only things would calm everyone down is guarantee that Microsoft would be paying for _our_ SLA breach compensation. But they don't. And I don't think anyone is paying their GH bill with a prorata of the number of time the platform was actually available.
(I'm also aware that the wording of the contract probably clearly says that you should not use GitHub for anything critical, that Microsoft is only a small startup in their garage, that you can't credibly expect 90% uptime anyway, and that it's all the fault of LLM slop ! Bad LLM slop ! Also, please buy our LLMs to generate more slop, please.)
They get paid millions of dollars by my company. They need to get it together.
I’m not a Meta fan but it’s interesting that they manage to keep their systems up with an order of magnitude more traffic. GitHub’s uptime is inexcusable.
I find it hard to believe that github APIs don't have rate limits to handle traffic spikes.
> Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t)
Oh, we do. Given the sheer number of users, it's almost guaranteed someone is on fire ever time GitHub is down. Statistics is a very charming branch of reality.
This should not be an excuse since they probably can use AI to fix it /partially sarcasm
hey bud your bias is showing
I have little time in my day to spend with my daughter. But I also have responsibilities. And one client has decided to bet on github. It's the only client I've ever worked with who has their code on github. EVERY other client has hosted their own gitforge or used bitbucket.
So now I am not angry because some critical piece of US-american infrastructure is down all the time.
I am angry because instead of spending time with my daughter I have to work on this later, because there are due dates and "Well, fucking GitHub was down" ain't gonna cut it.
My mind immediately went to this classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/303/
Secondly, the scale is WAY off and makes it look far worse than it is. It makes it look like 99.5% availability is practically zero availability.
Finally, GitHub’s availability is not a binary all-or-nothing proposition. They report incidents on a granular level, for example, webhook firing can be impaired while Git hosting may be working fine.
github enterprise is fully operational at the moment
https://eu.githubstatus.com/posts/dashboard
We cannot pull any actions images (or how it is called) for example.
So with the "elapsed time" out of the way (now over an hour, incidentally), how about "how long will it be down?"
I am seriously, 100%, contemplating the idea of offering consulting for migrating companies and projects out of Github. Given that I am fully employed, I'd only be able to do this on the weekends. Could I get a show of hands to get an idea of potential customers?
For a 20–30 dev team I'd be happy to help work through what that rollout would actually look like
Once this is done, the team would have two possible git remotes to work with. Given that gitea also allows mirroring with Github, the team would be able to even switch to Gitea as the "main" git remote and for PR reviews even if the CI part is still on Github.
The harder part would be migrating the CI jobs. But this also can be done in parallel and no one needs to cut out their Github actions immediately. Start with the simplest of the stages, e.g, the automated test suite, and once you get the whole pipeline from Woodpecker on an staging environment, you'd could take another weekend to test the whole workflow. Once the first project is successfully migrated, it becomes a matter of repeating the process.
Woodpecker is still a bit finicky and debugging it can be a bit annoying, but given that it's all based on docker it is a lot easier to debug a pipeline locally.
e.g.: gh pr merge 5062 -R <org/repo> --squash --delete-branch
I'm going to leave them alone for the rest of the day.
Github.com's promise is that it can be the central broker of open source code because it is reliable.
That promise hasn't been kept recently.
That said, Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales. It was a sign of growth that couldn't be properly managed but there was not viable alternative.
Hard but not impossible. Being unreliable might nudge a few people. Also, Twitter had their fail whale in their early phase (mostly), not twenty years or so into their existence.
The issue with replacing Github is that it takes more than version control and issue tracking to replace the network that is Github. It's effectively the largest social network for software developers on this planet.
Tangled (tangled.org) is built on the at protocol (bluesky) and seems like an interesting take on this. Most other solutions seem to just move the problem to another much smaller silo (gitlab, codeberg, etc) or throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances.
A federated approach seems like it is directionally right. Tangled is far from feature complete but I like the direction and it probably is a bit more resilient against global outages like this. I'm not a user yet but I'm keeping an eye on it.
May I ask what networking with other instances brings? Git is decentralised, so it works with self-hosted instances, right?
But if you want more than what email can offer, social networking is a thing with Github and it's a big reason for its success. It added a friendly UI and a way for users to engage with each other via issue trackers, pull requests, and all the rest. It has tens of millions of users that have accounts that each can each create issues, pull requests, fork each other's projects, etc. These people collaborate with each other on many millions of projects. The network effect of all these people being in one place where they can collaborate is vital to a lot of open source projects.
It's effectively the largest developer centric social network around. If the open source community fragments over a gazillion self hosted servers that each require a signup that don't really federate any signins and that don't allow aggregating notifications from all the projects you contributed to, etc. it would be a big loss for the open source world.
Tangled by making use of the atproto replicates much of this functionality. While also allowing people to run their own nodes and while allowing users and their projects to be moved between those nodes. That makes it the best of both worlds. You can self host it but without completely disconnecting from the community.
They're struggling to maintain a single nine these days.
Edit: I just realised it's hosted on gh pages and therefore probably can't be updated
Self-promo links below if you would like to star a few of mine good for developers.
https://gitlab.com/architecture-decision-record
Infrastructure should be neutral. Codeberg is a social club
Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation.
The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an overreliance on centralized services even though most such services are relatively easy to host yourself.
I run my own DevOps server based entirely on OSS. Is it github? No. Does it what I need it to do? Absolutely. Do I get 99.999% uptime? No, but when it's down or slow, I can fix it. When the corporate platform is down, I can only wait.
And "network effects" are not a good argument. Open Source was wildly successful long before centraliced DevOps platforms.
And in hindsight, the added friction of getting in touch with projects before being able to send them any code, was a benefit not a disadvantage. Because it acted as a barrier of entry that disincentivized alot of subpar code from hitting these projects in the first place.
The value these centralized services provide is the centralization itself - that makes things easy to find. Remember the web before Altavista? Finding anything was detective work, guessing domains, following links through multiple pages, digging in newsgroups, asking around, and so on.
Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
Now, if we could do something like GitHub on top of a network such as Mastodon, then we would have something that's centralized enough to be useful and distributed enough to be indestructible.
And in recent years, how is the centralized world of websearch doing?
https://www.techspot.com/news/101560-study-confirms-search-r...
> Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
None of that depends on a centralized provider. I have all the features you listed on my self-hosted platform as well.
Even if whoever owns and runs the infra would like that to be the case, the law of wherever they are can put restrictions on this as well.
My wishlist: free for open source and paid for closed source, able to do simple projects that are handwritten and also complex projects including AI LLM code that needs CI/CD/auditing, and hosting in the UK or EU.
Aside, I donate money to Codeberg because I think Codeberg is a wonderful service with strong commitment to free open source, and because I host some larger projects and AI projects that are for public welfare social good.
https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/architecture-dec...
https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/ways-of-working
https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/coordinated-vuln...
To Tangled -- it's great that the core code is MIT licensed and anyone could stand up a competing appview (the credible-exit property of atproto).
Do Tangled Labs Oy's articles include a purpose clause instead of the default profit-only purpose[0]? Or is something similar on the roadmap?
[0] OYL 1:5 reads The purpose of a company is to generate profits for the shareholders, unless otherwise provided in the Articles of Association.
You're deliberately avoiding a network effect lock-in by being federated, you make competition trivial by giving away not only the protocol but also making your code available, and you don't even restrict commercial competition by using the MIT license rather than, say, BSL.
To me that sounds like you are deliberately starting a race-to-the-bottom competition on price with, well, everyone capable of hosting a SaaS? Heck, if you don't end up with some solid competition the whole "federated code" USP doesn't play out. To me that doesn't exactly scream "good return on my €3,8M seed round". Am I missing a brilliant plan here, or should we expect a rug pull a few years down the line?
GitLab and Codeberg can absolutely become trash, each in their own way.
The solution isn't just "migrating off of GitHub"; it's "migrating to a platform that is unownable by design, not only hope".
And there are no good enough decentralized alternatives to GitHub yet.
Tangled.org's decentralization has serious holes. Radicle made an alien universe; a niche within a niche. Also, it's already having problems with ISPs: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move
Issues/PRs/comments are records owned by their authors, not by the repo. So an issue can span N users' PDSes. That's a neat model for social media, but a forge wants the repo to be the durable owner/context of its issues and history because that's where the comment/issue/etc. logically belongs.
The solution? tangled.org acts as a super advanced cache/aggregator for that. What can possibly go wrong?
So, relatively, not so long ago it was pretty common to host all this stuff yourself. I don't think (or maybe don't remember) Subversion having any Web interface of its own, but, since forever Git came with GitWeb. I remember configuring it for the first time: any extra bit of configuration, especially those that resulted in some added interactive functionality seemed exciting. For a week, I'd push something to my branch and immediately refresh the browser page to see my changes reflected in the remote repository :D
The infatuation wore off very quickly: after a month I have almost forgotten the Web interface even existed.
The cycle repeated with hosted services, the addition of PR interface, the addition of "pages", the bug reports, the built-in Wiki. After discovering the new gadget and associated hype, invariably, came the realization that the predating existing functionality was... better. The PR discussion in the Web page detached from the code is a lot worse than the PR discussion in the PR itself. The built-in issue tracker doesn't come close to the stand-alone product functionality. The built-in Wiki is ridiculously underwhelming when compared to an actual Wiki.
And so was the CI. For me, it started with Gitlab. There are oh so many reasons to hate Jenkins, so, whenever anyone announced an alternative platform, I'd absolutely check it out, and so did a lot of others, I presume. I was super hyped up about the possibility of running CI from the command line, completely locally on my laptop. And then it turned out to be a bait-and-switch kind of thing. I've created monumental dozen-steps and branching pipelines connecting multiple projects only to realize that the best CI is the one that uses as little as possible of the platform tools.
In the end of the day, I came to realization, that beside the social aspect of the platform like GitHub, everything that it offers on top of the essential Git repository storage is too low quality. And so do competitors. If I was ever again tasked with setting up a company code repository storage, I'd go with a physical server attached to the local office network, unless there's no office, in which case, probably, some EC2 VM would do the job...
Places like GitHub or Gitlab lure you in with their free tier offering, where you get the storage space and some other goodies for free, but once you need to upgrade to the paid tier, you inevitably realize that it's not worth the money they charge for it.
Well it's 100% down for me, so does this mean 20% of all users are fully down?
> Posted 1 minute ago. Aug 17, 2026 - 13:58 UTC
It also took them 20 minutes to realize that peoples requests to /pull/xx are not working :D
/project/product/issues/<number>
/in-product-messaging/copilot-budget-request-banner
/in-product-messaging/code-scanning-ai-findings-preview-banner
/github-copilot/chat
/_private/browser/stats
Or is their point about abandoned projects where the dev never clicks release after merging, or even never merges?
In May they had to solve for 30x growth overnight, and I would guess its closer to 100x by now. The reality is a centralized solution like this may no longer be a viable option with the scale of code generation.
You have a free bank holiday, go look at green trees, listen to birds, find somebody who's wrong on HN etc.
The only poor souls here are some github devops team (team of copilots?) and those using alternative services.
"Microsoft’s data-center shortages to persist longer than expected - Bloomberg"
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-data-center-shor...
Perhaps relevant tho. I would imagine if they could simply throw more hardware at it they would. And I wouldn't imagine inability to throw hardware at it would be due to software scaling issues. So perhaps it is simply lack of available hardware?
…& this is ignoring all the moral reason for avoiding US-based, publicly-traded, proprietary software for host largely free software. They also deny access to users due to US sanctions, privacy-conscious users won’t want to create accounts/agree to ToS, & rubbing shoulders with other corpos your project can be taken down if it upsets the corpos don’t like it (see youtube-dl, Switch emulators, etc.).
Event systems have interesting ways to fail that resist throwing good engineering at them to fix. For a long time I refused to have anything to do with them, but now we have whole companies built on them and also things like React and what can you do? There are harmonic failure modes where the system doesn’t fail but an event keeps echoing forever and using up 50% of the available compute before anyone notices it’s been like that for months and slowly getting worse. And then there’s the Poison Pill where a message crashes a process, then gets picked up by the next and kills that one too until they’re all dead.
A self hosted version of GitHub that is a precise mirror of an actual GitHub repository. That is, PRs from GitHub appear on the selfhosted instance and my reviews from the self hosted instance appear on GitHub. That way I can work on my private instance when GitHub is down (or slow) and I can be assured my work still appears to everyone online.
Does this exist?
I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
https://xcancel.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
---
edit: see a counterpoint I posted down-thread.
Manager: Why is the site down!?
Engineer: Because it can’t handle this level of traffic. We can rate limit to the level we can handle to keep the service running.
Manager: Okay, let’s do that!
Engineer: Okay. Rate limiting at N req/min.
Manager: I’m getting complaints we’re denying service to customers!? We can’t rate limit our users if they want to use it. Increase the rate limits.
I’ve had this conversation more than once in my career.
Imagine the software development lifecycle is a river blocked by several dams- necessary processes that also slow the water’s volume and speed. Writing the code was a very big dam upstream, and successive dams didn’t need to handle a lot of water. With that dam busted wide open, the torrent of code is inundating downstream processes. GitHub happens to host many of them.
Earlier this year the GitHub COO shared a post on Twitter with explosive numbers they were facing. I cannot seem to find it at the moment. (Edit: shared in other replies to this thread.)
I would argue they are. You can't cache a git repository and send people what it looked like a minute ago, because someone might have pushed 2 seconds ago.
Alternative theories include "azure sucks" and "they're vibecoding everything now".
Many people suspect it's the year-long migrating to Azure and all their products instead of the things they have been using.
Whatever the actual increase in productivity may be, the commits, clones, pushes, action runs, etc. are skyrocketing.
gh pr review <xx> --approve
gh pr merge <xx> --squash --delete-branch
It is time to give up on Github. This is just too much.
For people who want a similar experience today, I’d recommend trying Codeberg (An official instance of Forgejo) though. However, keep in mind they voted in July to ban mostly AI generated repositories. You can read about that here: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
I started with the cloud version, then moved to self-hosted because it wasn't a big effort for our team. We also reduced our monthly invoice by about 50% after the move.
* Forgejo
Those are my favorites. Both you can self-host for your company, including CI/CD.
We also have a free public Forgejo instance if you want to try it first.
Interestingly the API still works for creating an issue (but webhooks weren't fired).
In my experience some teams move a lot faster than others and that leads to asymmetric quality. If all devs could pick up a new language and skillset overnigh then companies would have a lot more flexibility in their roadmaps, but humans don't scale that way - with or without AI.
brutal
It is technically 20%, because a bunch of the requests that happen on page load do succeed. Just not the few crucial ones that are required for the page to load correctly - those return a 500 the vast supermajority of the time.
For supermajority: the construction means “beyond majority” or “above majority”, it is implemented as a higher percentage in most systems, and there is a utility in being able to refer to high ratio majority.
So people have repurposed a technical word to a general word, of roughly the same meaning.
"Disappoint" was originally the inverse of "appoint" and meant to remove from office.
Update: yes that worked. gh CLI using the API was able to make a PR while the web interface was inoperable.
Second update: defeat from the jaws of victory -- the page that displays open PRs is also down.
Third update: CI isn't working anyway, so the CLI PR creation workaround doesn't achieve much.
Enterprise works ok-ish, but the standard version has daily issue ever since.
They're making it very easy for a viable alternative to pop up and take their lunch - it just wont be Gitlab.
I never had to wonder if Steam is going to be working today, so I could play my game after work, but it's been an issue with GitHub since covid. At least for me.
Fortunately, due the nature of the service, I can sit out most downtimes. Most of the time at least.
It's a shame I had to go to HN to check if I was the only one instead of relying on their status page that they link.
GitHub's value is in the PR process, in CI/CD, releases, the issue tracker, and an identity system propping all of that. This is the thing to replace, and it's quite a bit harder.
Today I was forced to clone one because of "the incident". Which is a good thing.
Sure use it to collab externally, use it if you can't justify running your own infrastructure, but why are large companies choosing to place code externally - which is one secret leak away from compromise?
"Yeah we're unable to offer services, but so is [X BIG CORP] and [Y BIG CORP]. It's an industry outage, nothing we can do!"
The question is which features do we want of Github but functioning in a distributed way?
Identity? Stars? Issues?
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-availa...
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
> Update - We are seeing an approximate 20% error rate across numerous experiences including Pull Requests, Issues, and others. Investigations are currently under way and we will be posting updates as they become available Aug 17, 2026 - 13:45 UTC
NB: I am not OP but just providing some context as to why they might think this.
LLM code or just terrible management?
Seriously. It seems like there’s an issue every other week. It would historically be normal to provide post mortems, and maybe I’ve missed them but seems like there are almost weekly issues and no follow up into the core reasons why.
Or let me ask a more useful question: if we were to move, then to where? Ideally somewhere new (not Gitlab)
Otherwise there's no "we", Git is decentralized. Everyone can use whatever they want.
I suspect even poor uptime for many services is a cosmetic problem for most users.
I think it's fine if we begin to move back towards distributed software supply chain infrastructure.
Did Anthropic or OpenAI fail to sandbox their models again?
2) Issues showed Not found.
Anyway, GitHub Actions for building new release has progress. Good enough.
I wonder how it made it onto GitHub.
Anyone else using Fossil?
https://docs.gitlab.com/install/docker/installation/#install...
Thankfully this is encouraging me to stop working overtime for now and enjoy the rest of my night
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates?filters=%5B%22Azur...
That's not necessarily a bad thing for stability, but long-term I would not be surprised if it gets EOL-ed, or radically shrunk to just a basic Git mirroring service.
Discussion about it going ELO has been around since 2020-ish. But that is a worry i agree.
I get the feeling there is a long tail of old-school corps (migrated from the TFS days) that will keep the lights on. And for some orgs you just need "good enough" CI/CD pipelines that are reliable.
Maybe I'm a weirdo, but i find the kanban/sprint board pretty usable as well.
I slowly but surely lowered my expectations.
Seems like a simple solution.
It's all green which means it's working. Ignore the unicorn error on every page.
edit: After 5-10 minutes they got around to opening an incident and (apparently manually?) marking the API as having 'degraded performance'.
Your code will used for training and the platform enshitification has been accelerated by Microsoft. It would be wise to move to another platform or even better, host your own Gitlab/Forgejo/Gitea on a vps or at home.
On my side it is funny,I'm encountering the following errors: "no server available to process your request".
Maybe azure is out of capacity in its datacenters... Or they didn't pay the server bill.
I shit on Microsoft a lot here, but it’s not because the workers are dumb or that all their products are “bad”, because they’re not. It’s because the company very clearly is only ever focused on “the next marketable product”, and will let their existing products rot.
You can see this with a lot of Microsoft products. Windows NT was a a pretty cool OS/kernel at its time. NTFS was a pretty neat filesystem when it was new. They employ smart people for enough time to make a big headline, then make no effort to keep those products any good.
/pull/:id/changes is not working, but /pull/:id.diff _is_. It seems parts of the API is also ok? some gh commands I tried worked.
Files changed works on the mobile app somehow. I guess a particular api version or something is down.
Anyway if someone needs files changed and merge status, check the mobile app. Past actions are also loading on that.
[Android, India]
You can use as many AI agents as you want (it won’t solve the problem), but with that many outages ever since getting bought by Microsoft, it is more than enough time to give them to change. They don’t care and there is no CEO of GitHub to help either.
A self hosted instance would have much better uptime than GitHub and GitHub Actions at this point as I predicted 6 years ago. [1]
https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/github-copilot
Slop code is written and pushed ...
Aug 11, 2025: Dohmke leaves the sinking ship:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/github-ceo-thomas...
This is a true AI victory.
I'm tired of these BS stories being pushed by green accounts on HN like there's some damn agenda by someone who thinks their job will be saved "if only the CEOs realized that Slopcode Bad".
Orange account? I'm tired of the financially invested pushing their agenda. My job is secure, thanks. I don't work in the bullshit industry.
How hard is it to up scale their servers though...
Yes, github now has issues. Github is always having issues.
It's just a constant pain in the ass.
Wherever I have anything to say I prefer ANY other gitforge over this piece of shit.
The UX is so bad. Things don't work as expected. Even basic things like composing an email, copy and pasting, formatting text are always a chore.
Try setting up a Teams integration vs a Slack integration. Gmail is absolutely light years ahead in UX. I really miss working at a company that uses Slack + Google Suites.
- Super poor formatting when trying to do more complex posts such as headings and bullet points in replies
- Copy and pasting images often don't work
- When you upload a video, sometimes the last 1-2 seconds get cut for no reason at all
- Keyboard shortcuts are suboptimal. For example, cmd+ shift + v which should clear formatting does simply does not work on Teams/Outlook.
- Grouping chats is far less intuitive than Teams channels
First of all, I highly doubt it. Second, how would you even know that?
Like..where does one 'get help' for being racist? Honest question, I don't mean to sound snarky...
Man. This site is filled with weird racism.
If Capitalists could, and are doing, they'd make alabama be engineers if they could afford it.
It's so weird watching the tech work force go ham into the "tey terk ow jobz" rather than look at capitalism.
Centralization combined with massive AI demand is almost certainly the problem. If you move to GitHub Enterprise (on your own servers), you can probably exceed the availability of the current public cloud environment.
It is surprising that GHES rarely comes up as an option. It is a really good answer to this particular issue and eliminates the need to retrain the team on new tools. I understand the inclination to get salty about a vendor and cast the proverbial baby out with the bath water, but we must resist our impulses if we wish to make decisions that the business will find agreeable. The incremental additional licensing cost of moving from public cloud to on-prem is roughly $15-20 per user seat. If you only have 10-20 people using GH today and are deeply struggling with the consequences of these outages, this seems like a pretty easy decision to make.