How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?
For example, here is a Hacker News story about GitHub being down on July 28th 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12178449
Here's GitHub's historical uptime graph (on which this chart is based), saying there was no recorded downtime that day, or in fact that entire month: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=40
I honestly can't explain the discrepancy between the graph in the article and the month over month stats on the same page, but the latter tracks both to my own subjective experience of GitHub and their own internal metrics.
https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=3000
According to it, GitHub had 100% uptime from June to August 1996.
I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
That elephant didn’t even exist yet for the first few years of poor uptime shown in the graph in TFA… I don’t really disagree if we’re talking about the recent uptime issues, but how does that explain the years 2020-2023?
Private corporate codebases are a poor fit for GH because they don't benefit from public social graph effects. And the typical codebase isn't so large as to be technically challenging to deal with with OSS tools. I'd guess they make up a substantial share of revenue.
But once the reliability is called into question, self-hosted or smaller alternatives start to look good. Although there's some trickiness there if you want to be super cautious about making sure you can get to your code+infra in case of a vendor incident, especially if you're cloud based.
If all companies did this, there'd be no free tier on Github. You get the free tier because the SaaS customers are subsidising the free tier.
There's something called "rate limits" that engineers not working for GitHub have probably heard of; it's this crazy idea that you should limit the load on your infra in order to avoid downtime. GitHub is not the first free service to ever have to deal with bots.
Are you paying them in proportion to the resources they expend on you?
There's this thing called "sustainability", and every company needs to have it. Github cannot continue on the current trajectory where every AI-bro wants to run an agent that generates 1000s of lines of code per hour, dozens of commits per hour... and provide that for free to a few dozens of millions of users who won't pay.
That being said, Microsoft does have an opportunity here - AI-bros are willing to pay $200/m to burn tokens so Github should offer a plan for Copilot, say $400/m, that includes a repo.
If they don't ban AI agents on free tiers, they are going to be out of business soon.
GitHub action, co pilot. Oh and that ugly AI search I'm unable to disable. Migration to azure.
Yes Microsoft managed to ruin the network effect. Outages? The straw that broke the camel's back.
The next year they removed the limitation on collaborators on private repos for free users.
In the last 4 years they’ve significantly improved their project management tools. I think a lot of teams can make do with GitHub Projects, they’re pretty decent.
Who knows if any of these are directly because of Microsoft or not. But there has naturally been material improvements to GitHub in the years after being bought by Microsoft.
It's more like any positive actions they have had are being outright dismissed or forgotten. They removed several restrictions that Github had over private accounts, as well as github actions. Aside from the downtimes, the Github of today is fantastic compared to pre-acquisition Github.
It provides huge value for anyone running an opensource AI generated project.
While I'm 99% sure it is not true, it makes me sleep better at night. And giggle a little when it goes down.
Around 8 years ago I was working for a company that they also acquired, and they also forced us to move to Azure. Performance was terrible and our system wasn’t just working there as it should. A few years later our service was dead and all customers moved to one of their office products.
"Yes, it (AI) will kill open source—at least as we know it. I’m convinced that GitHub and GitLab will eventually stop offering their services for free if the flood of low-quality, "vibe-coded" projects—complete with lengthy but shallow documentation—continues to grow at the current rate."
C'mon.
- Microsoft committed to AI. - AI slop is increasing the costs for maintaining/running GitHub. - GitHub is sinking.
This is interconnected. I can think of numerous other ways how this would be handled. But Microsoft went the AI slop way already. There is no way back for them.
Microsoft investors
I'm the only person on this network that would even look at Github, and my connection has a dedicated IP, no CGN.
The page will load correctly
So there is no rate-limit, it's a default deny for unauthenticated requests... which could be fine but at least update the error message to reflect that.
lol!
I also have to say that I'm surprised about the backlash against bitbucket. I find the UI incredibly simple and clear, as do all of the new joiners. With Script Runner you can do some pretty amazing things. It handles the huge repo's well too.
It's not really any better on Github. Why do I have to click on "Files changed" to approve a PR? Overall I would say it is on par with Github. Worse in some ways; better in others.
On the one hand the acquisition of GitHub may have caused the availability to be worse.
On the other hand, the 100.00% availability before the acquisition looks suspicious, wondering if it's not just the status page being better updated.
(I'm aware of the recent availability problems with GitHub, but on the graph the problems start in 2020 and don't seem to worsen significantly)
Side note: I read the URL as "dBus hell". We've all been there m8
I would really like to see what it would be like doing all code reviews over email. The repo would just be a simple vps-style server with git-only ssh access, there’d be a particular for-review/ branch namespace for code to be reviewed, and CI would just be a bot waiting for branches to show up and would mark refs as good or not by just annotating/tagging them. It could reply in the email thread with results too.
The mailing list would have a web archive viewer, naturally. That’s how you could look at old reviews. There’s tons of existing solutions for this, and it’s just html.
Chat would be on IRC with bots to archive the channels. Easy as hell.
The whole thing (except maybe the CI runners which need beefier hardware) could be done on a very cheap server.
GitHub is waaay over engineered for what you need to run a software project. Look at the Linux kernel, they just use a simple mailing list, and it’s debatably the most successful software project of all time.
Issue/bug tracking is scarier though. Because I’d probably want to yak shave my own solution and get too involved with that and not even focus on what the company does. Maybe it could be a bug tracking software company?
They also support deployments from GitLab (so long as you're using the gitlab.com-hosted instance and not a self-hosted GitLab instance). If you've deployed your own self-hosted forge, then you can connect DigitalOcean App Platform to it by using gitlab.com as a bridge—register an account on gitlab.com once and instruct your self-hosted forge to replicate copies to gitlab.com. You don't really need to actually use GitLab.
Having said that, considering that DigitalOcean is in the business of selling IaaS/PaaS, it's loony that they don't let you connect to, say, your own self-hosted Forgejo running on their infrastructure…
(Indeed, considering how many people would like to self-host their own forge but how few people want to actually set up and do admin for it, it's loony that DigitalOcean doesn't pick up, say, Forgejo and/or an alternative and offer a sharply discounted (e.g. $20/year) quasi-managed one-click deployment option with first-class support for connecting to their App Platform.)
For things that require GitHub I’ve been able to mirror repos there and get things working. Keeping code in sync is annoying though.
Money to be made. And they have (had) nice API for most development needs. The actual distribution is a arduous though, mostly around the Review process.
I'm also happy with how generous their free hosting and actions are.
Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
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.
So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features.
>Written by human All opinions are my own and not those of a large language model. Everything I write is one hundred percent human. Because I care!
The only concerns are if it were exposed to the public internet and scale. For personal stuff? It's spectacular.
They're free to email me a diff :-)
Jokes aside, the era of community built software is coming to an end. There is no place in the world now for a repository of open source projects.
I had to begrudgingly use GitHub over my preference GitLab to use some 3rd party AI features.
The solution for GitHub is to charge or rate-limit some of these 3rd parties integrations and come up with an equitable solution.
Agreed. Sick of the bloatware.
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.
So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features.
That being said, Microsoft in general in relation to GitHub has shown at least historically they've caused more issues. Outages on Github have become so common place that I genuinely think people have simply gotten used to it. The recent round of these were just bad enough where people felt strong enough to make their own down status page https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/. Whether you agree with how they gathered their data, there is something being felt by the community that Microsoft is not being transparent with these issues.
Aw, c'mon! The did this for about 4 months which ended in 2015! Prior to that they had Windows installers which did the same, but that also only lasted a few months.
It's now 2026. Exactly what software did you host on sourceforge from 2011 to 2015? Because I hosted my GPL stuff there, and I moved away because I was affected, and yet I am not concerned that they will do that again.
There is no way I'm going to let a VCS put code into one of my repos without my asking for it or consent. Full stop. I moved all my significant code to codeberg but kept the github account, so my username doesn't get squatted.
This is not a problem caused by normal people doing normal things so I don’t understand why people should take this into consideration.
- They knew the traffic would increase.
- they have the capacity to handle such traffic financially.
- there are a ton of other systems that handle more traffic and basically never go down.
- they don’t have to accept slop into their platform.
I still don't see this tool when it's about a forge. It is a fantastic tool. Seriously guys, you should really consider it !
Edit: Though I do think they're mad for not offering a hosted version, especially right now while GitHub resentment is riding high.
Last week, Robin release a very nice feature for vibe coder. AWESOME
Ghostty is leaving GitHub
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
Before GitHub
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940921
Days without GitHub incidents
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48012022
GitHub Actions is the weakest link
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47933257
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
Now, are you going to finally self host or should we continue to expect another outage on GitHub?
This time, there is no CEO of GitHub to help us. It is Copilot, and Tay.ai that are still struggling to maintain GitHub.
