Incident with Pull Requests, Issues, Git Operations and API Requests
githubstatus.com188 points by maxnoe 5 hours ago
188 points by maxnoe 5 hours ago
Normally I defend GH in the comments of these incidents but it’s been an impressively bad month by their standards, even when you filter for critical components filter out sev-2’s and 3’s.
It's not physically possible to run post-mortems for issues at those rates.
They should install OpenClaw for that as well.
The UI of that page is so nice, should build a github competitor.
The user profile / contributions and PR UX is pretty much the entire "hub" product since git is a fully separate offline app.
> The UI of that page is so nice
Is it? Seems a text description of "Make a website outlining 'How cooked GitHub' is with a modern style" to basically any LLM would produce exactly that UI and design, literally nothing of that design a human had any influence on, besides the ones selecting what training data the used LLMs was trained with.
I think most of us who've tried using LLMs for web-design can recognize that style and design at this point, regardless of model actually used.
Oh wow, I'm in the position to be able to give a peek behind the curtain of something (validly!!) critiqued as AI slop! Exciting.
I originally made the core data functionality of this site for myself because I was curious what the uptime stats for each service were (I build something that heavily depends on GitHub), and to viz the distribution/severity of those incidents, again per-service, over time.
It involved a lot of back-and-forth, and is not a one-shotter; maybe closer to 40-50 shots over maybe ~10 hours of human time. A couple memorable things that made it complicated, irrespective of the UI: sneaky bugs around double-counting time for overlapping incidents, no GitHub API for incidents so you need to puppeteer-scrape the backlog of incidents to get historical data. Although, you all are right to call out that the CSS was three shots, though, and it shows :) I thought it looked so cool in ~January 2026 and now it gives me the ick, too!
For people who are curious about how much direction went into the information architecture/presentation, it was fairly substantial. I wanted a contribution graph style viz and it took many turns to get it working the way I wanted. The swimlane viz for selected-day-incident visualization was also me, because I love swimlane graphs.
I ended up sharing it with some folks and they wanted to reference it, so I put it on a website. So it's jokey for sure, but I take my jokes seriously! I'm grateful that people have feedback on how it can better functionally and visually :)
Compared to near unusable pages that large organizations produce, yes this page is highly effective at conveying information. Who cares how it was produced?
> Who cares how it was produced?
Well, we're at least two people who care, since we were conversing about how good/bad the webdesign is, then you jumped in here :) If you don't care, why bother to reply to people who seemingly do care? What kind of conversation are you expecting here, "Yeah, do tooo"? :|
A lot of software engineers do still care how software is produced. That's a good thing!
> this page is highly effective at conveying information
Is it though? If the page is near unreadable?
* Almost pure-black background rendering every not-pure-white colour barely readable
* Dark-grey and low saturation colours used almost everywhere, for both fonts and other coloured elements (the orange cells in the calendar are the most readable thing)
* Thin fonts - coupled with the dark grey colours this just adds to the readability issues
* Yet another incredibly long info-dump of a page
And then as far as actual information:
* Vanity metrics as the main information, that is a lot of things with no context or historical information
* A lot of aggregates and rollups that aren't that useful
No, I haven't tried Reader Mode.
It's a good demo for UI state syncing though, I'll give it that.
What really grinds my gears is how easy it is to get better designs out of LLMs. But if you don't ask, you get the default.
Here is a provocative thought - maybe these are the so-called "better designs" from LLMs? It's not like writing English sentences is some huge secret you are sitting on that no one else knows.
> It's not like writing English sentences is some huge secret you are sitting on that no one else knows.
I'd actually say what really makes an excellent engineer stick out among many great engineers, is their ability to communicate clearly and knowing what needs to be communicated vs not, basically being way better at language and communication in general, and they also understand the important of it.
Outside design systems I rarely get good CSS from LLMs.
3D type stuff too, it's useless outside boilerplate.
Very little spatial reasoning training, no end-user subjective reasoning inference (Google is starting to though even in unrelated chats), so it's no surprise the LLM doesn't know what you want.
Since I don't even know what I want half the time until I saw it, the subjective reasoning piece is key - that is, being able to predict what I'll want to pretty good accuracy. Then you have your agents etc.
as someone who doesn't know how to get better design out of LLMs, can you elaborate?
I’m actively working on an alternative Frontend for Forgejo at the moment, completely self hostable, free, and open source.
Moving everything from GitHub to Forgejo and Tangled for now. These outages haven’t effected me for the past month because of this.
Can you elaborate on how your Forgejo frontend will be different than the default one? I'm asking because I've only ever used GitHub, GitLab and Forgejo for longer periods and Forgejo was the fastest and easiest to use for me.
>"The UI of that page is so nice"
Most part screen is taken by picture. Contrast ratio is really low. Hard to read Should they remove that useless banner, current status which is the most interesting part coud've been made visible right away.
I would call this whole thing highly un-ergonomic
May has been filled with critical issues. It seems it's getting worse over time.
Commits are up 14x year-over-year
Yea but thats not really an excuse, is it? They offer a service, (some) people pay for that service and should therefore expect it to work. If GitHub cannot keep up with the growth then they could disable new account registrations or start reducing free tiers so people either use the free tier more mindfully or need to pay for usage-base products like Actions which would GitHub allow to scale.
I mean it's an easy problem to solve when it's just speculating solutions. But there's a very possible reality where in 5 years guys are making YouTube video essays about the fall of Github caused by their "obviously stupid decision" to throttle access to people who were trying to use their service in record numbers, leaving opportunity for someone else to come in and take their lunch.
I don't envy their position of having to scale that fast on something that has to be instant and real-time. As far as I know, you can't do CDN/edge caching shenanigans with a remote git repository like Google can with a YouTube video. It's gotta always be reading/writing to the latest, single source of truth.
Sure, backseat commenting is easier and I wouldn't wanna be in charge at github right now, but on the other side there also a reality where we'd see video essays about githubs downfall because their reliability crashed so hard that businesses could not trust them and moved to competitors / self hosted instances which then meant less paid users to subsidize the ever growing demand of the free users.
Yes it's potentially a write-heavy workload which also needs to be consistent aka the worst case scenario.
The easy solutions like caching and read replicas don't work and you're forced to go the route of sharding or similar techniques that have much more painful tradeoffs.
I'm not sure if that's why everything keeps breaking but at that scale write-heavy workloads are never going to be easy
Not a valid excuse without knowing what their historical growth rate has been. And how much of the instability is load related.
Is the “streak” days of continuous uptime, or of days with at least one downtime incident? I think it’s the latter :]
It's a streak for continuous uptime, and yeah it is fairly depressing to imagine overseeing that :/
It looks like it is the number of consecutive days with no incident. If you look at 31 Dec 2025, that corresponds to an 8-day period with no incidents.
I guess that also means this year GitHub has not yet made it a single week without an outage of some kind.
Name one thing Microsoft didn't run into the ground post-acquisition
hey now, LinkedIn was terrible before Microsoft.
Java or Bedrock edition, and have you tried logging into your EntraID Microsoft Teams for Xbox account lately? Make sure to check the box to keep you logged in!
Last I heard UK Minecraft players aren't even allowed to talk anymore without ID verification.
And if someone makes a server that doesn't do the chat verification, Microsoft blacklists that server in the client-side server address textbox. This system was developed to destroy pay-to-win servers, but they're now applying it against servers that refuse to censor "fuck".
Not as bad as it is now. All I see are suggested posts from people I never connected with and those are full of instagramesque self-promoting banal vibes.
TBH, even LinkedIn seemed to provide me with posts advertising events that happened two weeks ago a bit less pre-acquisition.
I think Minecraft is still in good shape
I wouldn't know, somehow this game I bought maybe 15 years ago is no longer playable for me, my account was supposed to be migrated from Mojang to Microsoft or similar, but then that never happened or something, and trying to login now asks me to contact Microsoft support, which I've tried 3-4 times, never had anyone respond to me so who knows how the game is today? I stopped trying at this point...
Personally, once a game I own is janked from my hands because of organizational decisions, that's the time I'll stop consider the game "in good shape", but I'm sure the people who had to buy the same game a second time still enjoy it.
Yes, the account migration was a mess. Support response times were at least 30 days, if you ever actually received a response at all (I never did). I did buy the game a second time in order to play with my kids.
They deleted my account from 2010 because I didn't convert it to a Microsoft one. They baked an incredibly aggressive chat filter into multiplayer, even if you're not playing on official servers. They've added microtransactions for things that we previously free (skins, resource packs). They force you into their shitty, bloated, user-hostile launcher with adverts.
It's been nonstop content-slop since the acquisition. New mobs, new blocks, new items, new blocks, new items, new mobs, new mobs, new biomes. Some of them are good but the totality of adding a bunch of stuff has been to destroy the simplicity that was one of the draws of the original game. Now it's an exploration and niche-mechanics-exploitation game more than a virtual legos game. You don't go mining any more, you find trading loops with villagers.
This was happening to some degree pre-acquisition, but since the acquisition it's been this non-stop.
Some of it's good. The Nether and the oceans were really boring before their respective updates.
They should have called Minecraft "done" around the acquisition time and started on Minecraft 2.
GH was acquired by microsoft some eight years ago. It has been working quite well until recently.
People may have had complaints about functionality, features, commercial issues, but the thing used to at least have a decent uptime until recently.
Has nothing to do with Microsoft acquisition... AI usage has increased demand and load. More PRs, more Action runners, more of everything firing. GitHub just wasn't ready for the scale and are now having issues catching up with it as it continues to increase exponentially.
This is a convenient lie that GH likes to tell. Growth is nothing like exponential, its at most 300% over several years according to their own public numbers (presented misleadingly on graphs)
But a couple of years ago they were crowing about how much work they were doing to prepare for “a billion developers”. If they had actually done that then the actual load from agents should have been no problem.
Is this growth in resource usage or growth in revenue? Because those numbers aren't necessarily coupled. I.e most action runners are free
Yeah, that and Microsoft has been slow to move the infrastructure to something that scales better to handle that load.
The more surpassing part is that Microsoft hasn't figured out a way to manage/contain the AI-sourced traffic better so it doesn't create all this noisy neighbor problems for non-AI usage/users.
Github's core platform doesn't really make that separation, anything a human can leverage on github an AI agent can as well, just faster and with heavier usage. End of day agents and humans are using the same services.
MSFT is also forcing its subsidiaries to “lean into AI” so that they can fire people to cover for Satya’s bad investments
> It has been working quite well until recently.
I'm not sure how reliable the data is, but average uptime seems to have dipped measurably starting within a year of the aquisition, according to https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
It also used to be run as an independent company with access to MS's resources.
Now it's a unit in their AI hype machine.
MSFT was pretty arms length for the first 5-6 years. I was honestly kind of impressed and it made my opinion of MSFT better. But then AI made it too attractive of a target and MSFT couldn't help but make it a place the former CEO wanted to leave (and it has been running headless for about a year now).
It's quite disappointing objectively, but I expected worse from MSFT.
They are already cooked as this has been happening ever since the Microsoft acquisition and it was run to the ground before 2023.
At this point you would get better uptime by just self-hosting your own GitLab, Forgejo or Codeberg instance instead of dealing with Github's unreliablity.
There is no defending them with their clear neglet and carelessness of the platform.
If all you need is a repository, you don't even need any of these. You need SSH access to a server, and optionally, one of several web front-ends. Git comes with a CGI script that handles public anonymous checkouts via HTTP(S), although since nginx doesn't support CGI, integrating those is a little bit tricky as you need a FastCGI wrapper.
I moved most of my projects off GitHub to Forgejo and will be using Tangled too for public repositories. I don’t think people realize that if you self host Forgejo, you get 99% of the functionality of GitHub with zero of the limitations. Especially if you have the hardware to spare for CI runners. And if self hosting isn’t your thing you can always just use Codeberg and Tangled directly.
I’m working on an open source Forgejo browser called Joui. It’s coming along nicely, and is so much snappier than GitHub in every single way.
More AI should fix it.
New PR: revert GitHub software and infrastructure to version of June 1st, 2018.
New PR: disable new user signups for 6 months
HR initiative: all future KPIs automatically require three-nines availability; all bonuses are forfeited, regardless of accomplishments, if annual availability falls below target
HR initiative: fire CEO and CTO
New PR: disable Github API New PR: block (ai) bots through attestation to make usage predictable
This is getting ridiculous. One particularly concerning thing I’m seeing is that pull requests on both the web UI and API aren’t reflecting all commits or branch changes consistently. It would be very easy to merge something without realizing you’re not actually reviewing the full diff.
Yeah, I've had several occasions recently (seemingly not related to any incidents on the status page) where I've had to wait 20 minutes to an hour to be able to open a PR, because Github didn't recognize my branch had any new commits compared to the base branch.
Before clicking, I assumed this was going to be a write-up of the one from a few days ago instead of an entirely new incident.
is it me or ever since AI coding became the norm, there have been way more outages with otherwise reliable services?
I get downtime on Supabase every few weeks. Even Cloudflare. And now Github
Yes, because that caused the usage of the services to skyrocket, GitHub runs on Azure and Azure is experiencing capacity strain due to AI, so GitHub's services are struggling to auto-scale
Per a report that came out the other day, the GitHub move to Azure has been slowed down (i.e. I don't think it's done). But maybe you have newer/better info than me
No, it's not just you. It is fairly obvious what's happening - the same old Entshittificators now have a great tool to up the speed of entshitification by 100x - thus these crappy outages every other day.
They are definitely more outages but the question is if these outages are due to the providers using LLMs to build there products and are therefore not delivering the quality they did before or have LLMs enabled a completely new user base to create projects which they deploy in the free tiers of named providers and they simply cannot keep up with the growth and the new influx of free users is skewing their mixed calculations (free vs paid) so heavily that they cannot scale without losing money. I'd probably say it's a mix of both.
Correct. There’s no incentive to be careful anymore when you can just prompt an LLM to fix it
Not just you, but uncertain whether it's due to unreviewed slop going to production, or increased demand due to slop generation.
No but everyone is pretending that everything is fine. Actually, no, no one is pretending anything. No one cares, really.
Good that the Billing functionality is still at 3 nines at least.
Well, the significant growth comes from freemium usage. A whole lot of vibe slop triggering actions, with no supporting business. So revenue has not tracked all other growth and the billing system isn’t stressed.
I'd appreciate if they'd not mark the incident as resolved when there's still fallout - ie: my commits didn't display on the branch, my actions didn't run
It's the same issue as the other day - display message at the top admitting that cache needs to be refreshed (or whatever the wording was)
Someone linked this third-party "honest" status page:
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
Seems more accurate with my experience of GitHub.
It seems before AI eats software, its going to first eat GH and Microsoft.
Are they running paid marketing campaigns for Gitlab ?
Self-hosting forgejo under tailscale + mirroring public repos through GitHub
Has worked wonders for me :)
Forgejo is fantastic. I do think it could use a fresh coat of paint from a designer but it’s otherwise really good.
Gitea (what Forgejo forked from) recently stole the sidebar on repos from GitHub and I think that would be great for Forgejo to steal too…
Forgejo themed by Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo (the codeberg theme is extremely low contrast)
Forgejo default: https://v15.next.forgejo.org/pparaxan/quark
Forgejo themed by Lix: https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix
Gitea: https://gitea.com/gitea/awesome-gitea
Gitea themed by Blender: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender
I personally like Blender’s Gitea theme better than the rest but I guess that’s subjective. In dark mode I do not like the low contrast Codeberg theme or the default Forgejo theme, but all of the instances custom themes look great.
As far as Git forges go in general though.. tangled is very pretty https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core I think more power user oriented software should be comfortable with compact interfaces
That Blender Gitea theme is really nice! I wonder why exactly it's so much easier on the eyes? In a lot of ways all of these are "just Github" with minor changes, so the one that is actually better really stands out.
It's fascinating how fast the Forgejo I host at my university's laboratory loads from my home network. Every page load is <100ms. I think it goes to show how much bloat we don't realise exists in modern webapps.
GitHub used to be like that before they rebuilt everything in React.
No, they didn’t rebuilt everything in React and current sluggishness of page loads is not related to React.
Ideally those forgejos would safe enough to be on the public internet (and using a federation protocol like activitypub) so we don't have to go through a centralized service such as github and not locked behind private networks (such as tailscale nets)
It's so unfortunate that Gitlab is a complete mess, that GitHub has no real competition now. I can only think that few months to a year from now there will be _something_ that works on an enterprise scale.
Have you forgotten about Azure Dev Ops aka Visual Studio Team System aka Team Foundation Server*?
Yes, it's still Microsoft, but they've forgotten about it, so it runs entirely adequately and is actually a surprisingly okay github replacement. It does nothing special, but it does do everything, just in a way you often would rather it wouldn't. It doesn't have the flexibility of JIRA for the ticketing, and the deployment machinery doesn't have the fanciness ( and vendor threat ) of chaining github actions, but it does handle both.
I haven't used gitlab, so I'm curious to hear what makes it a "complete mess" too.
* Microsoft's headless chicken naming strategy in full force, it's a miracle they haven't yet renamed and rebranded it to align with copilot yet.
Only alternative outside of GitHub and GitLab I've used was Bitbucket, and it was worse - but this was time when GitHub was good.
I'd consider self-hosting GitHub Enterprise before putting my team through the pain of Gitlab.
How is it painful to use GitLab? Curious, as a user of both, I find them both nice. I like GitLab CI/CD more than I do GHA, but that's personal preference/bias more than anything objective.
Gitlab CI has some tech debt from accumulating geological layers of different ways to do things, but overall it's pretty good, it scales to more complicated setups, and it's not too painful.
Now the best way to use GHA is to do the bare minimum. Put all your CI logic in a script that you can test locally, and just have GHA run your script. Even that is painful. And, somehow, impossible to make secure without having spent 5,000 hours reading all the previous ways people got pwn'd by Github Action's horrendous security model.
My main problem with Gitlab is that after years I still can't find what I'm looking for in the UI. It's always exactly in the third place I look. Otherwise Gitlab has been good. Even self-hosted works pretty well.
expanding on the parent a little
* GiLab — Ops centric
* GitHub — Developer centric
if you just want somewhere to stick a code repo and build a release every so often — dont use gitlab, you will not enjoy it.
> My main problem with Gitlab is that after years I still can't find what I'm looking for in the UI.
i still get lost too after several years daily driving gitlab. this is the Ops centric thing. they provide a lot of options. lots of options is good for Ops.
> Now the best way to use GHA is to do the bare minimum
yeah, i’m an ops guy, so the maintaining custom actions stuff on github is horrible for me vs click a button and move on with my day — once i find the button that is! xD
Everything about their UI/UX screams of doing the bare minimum to check off a box on a feature list. It reminds me of Jira.
As a daily GitLab user, I'd say that would be the main criticism I could levy at it as well. It does feel like there are a number of "and the kitchen sink" type features that are just there to check a box in a RFP or something.
That said, are the majority of people actually even _using_ those features? For us we're essentially just using GitLab for git, merge requests, and CI pipelines. A couple places we use the static page hosting. (First thing I do whenever I create a new repository is go into the settings and just uncheck _all_ the boxes.)
All of that core functionality works really well and is more than polished enough from my point of view.
If you go to www.githubstatus.com, the downtime is not showing in the chart. I was annoyed enough yesterday when I visited this page to figure out why my Actions had failed and was greeted with big green ticks and only a tiny red rectangle halfway down the page to indicate the problem.
This time they've just scrubbed the evidence outright?
It was previously showing, but I believe the incident has bee resolved now. At least, PRs work for me when they previously didn't.
The "Git Operations" chart is showing all green, but several of the recent blocks have a note showing there was an outage.
Today's is green, even though there was an outage.
They may have gotten down to only 2 nines on most of their services, but at least the LLM is still running at full power! must increase value for shareholders
The software reliability and uptime is going bad across the industry, railway, github etc
wild that there is a large pattern forming up of unreliable software being pushed
Maybe GitHub needs to freeze free repository creation until they get this under control because this is ridiculous.
Or maybe they need to bring back quality assurance expertise to the company.
And/or move more contextually aware humans with 10K+ hours of hard won experience and fear of failure/sense of pride back into the loop.
I mean, if we're talking about "fixing" the symptoms of the downtimes rather than the sources and causes, I guess they could just null route github.com until they have things under control?
Personally, I think they'd have more luck actually attacking the source, what that might be. Somehow I think Microsoft's push for "Every developer only use AI for development, no manual thinking/coding from now on" is the detrimental step, seemingly many companies are still discovering the right approach. Put a freeze to that, and I'm fairly sure you'd see less downtime pretty much immediately, unless all real engineers already left the company, I'm sure I would have at this point.
It’s not just their own slop that’s causing this, it’s also caused by the tsunami of slop being uploaded by vibe coders.
If you want to upload to GitHub, you should pay. The days of charitably giving away compute for the “open source communities” are over.
Grandfather existing public repositories in, then cut it off. Stop the bleeding. It doesn’t have to be forever.
But everything else still works fine, right?
git is supposed to be decentralized.
maybe it's time to revert back to the central idea of git & not centralize around a particular provider.
for issues - mailing list will do. you can always slap a beautiful ui if you want to or a tui (as is the fad) these days.
actions can also be decentralized via an API spec & webhooks.
Can't they just use one of Satiya's "powerful daily prompts" and ask the - was it "Mico"? - to excrement their way out of these troubles? Ah - you're telling me those powerful prompts were just bullshit for the lazy office cretin who is mainly reading and writing emails throughout the week? They don't really create any new fucking value? No way - I thought CEOs paid tens of millions of dollars each year had real competence justifying such high salaries.
Tried to do a git push - it succeeded after 3 mins. Then I wanted to open a PR and it failed with a 500 error.
Facepalmed and decided that this is it for today.
Maybe we should start posting av story when GitHub has been fine for some time instead of posting every incident
I'm so done with GitHub.
GitHub Incident again/
as a github user, we are paying for the slow git operations through our github action minutes, if someone from GH is here, will you be compensating for it?
For years we had a GitHub status thing in our Slack but I had to remove it about a year ago because the noise got too much, it would be unbearable in 2026.
Yesterday my CI runs wouldn't even be created because Actions was eating shit, and today my CI runs get created but fail because the API is eating shit. Fun.
GitHub is not agent scale.
Multiple companies are trying to create new versioning primitives/architectures which can handle machine-level code generation - 1 commit per second per repo.
It's like switching from horse buggies to automobiles, the whole worlds needs re-architecturing to handle the new load.
The age of boutique hand-coding is being replaced by the age of industrial software factories.
Why the heck would you want to do this. Using git as your undo chain sounds like a pretty awful thing to do.
I think it'd be pretty neat to be able to rebase my undo history on to a remote branch someone else is working on.
> new versioning primitives/architectures which can handle machine-level code generation - 1 commit per second per repo.
This is not a particularly novel level of scale. Facebook's mercurial backend had to handle >5,000 developers committing to the singular monorepo long before LLMs were a thing
Yes, on a single repo. Now multiply that per bazillion companies on github, some of which are trying that.
I think it is time to decouple GitHub from Microsoft. Microsoft has shown irresponsible behaviour - and this continues. They keep on going at it until nothing works anymore. Typical microslop work.
You don't get to control that. It is Microsoft's right to do whatever it wants with GitHub - it could shut down tomorrow, or demand face ID. If you want to control what happens with a thing, you have to make the thing instead of letting someone else make the thing and sell it to Microsoft.
Your choice is to accept the product that exists on the market, switch to another product that exists on the market (such as Codeberg or self-hosted Forgejo), make your own product, or not use any.
Fed up and bored of this
I thought it was the yesterday's thread but no, here we go again
Again?
It was just yesterday [0] that GA was down and another incident today? I am convinced that Copilot and Tay.ai are destroying GitHub and there is no CEO of GitHub to contact.
Now will you please self-host as I said 6 years ago? [1]
You think a Microsoft chatbot from 2016 is destroying GitHub?
At this point, you might as well say that is what's happening at GitHub with the help of GitHub Copilot since nothing has changed and has only gotten worse over time.