GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?

1. Github has enterprise users who paid for the service, their day job requires Github to be available and working

2. Github has generous free tier which is the one which is exploring a lot more with the AI generated code.

It is a complexity in itself but the traffic should have been separated, the free users should not be allowed to bring down Github for enterprise customers (Just to clarify, I am free user myself). And if they do not have capacity it would have been perfectly fine to push back or throttle new users/repositories.

I don't think this is commendable at all. I give GitHub a lot of money and I'm tired of it being wasted with downtime.

I can have sympathy for the humans caught in the crossfire but only managing one nine of availability on a commercial service is not acceptable.

They decided they needed to capture the whole open source ecosystem by turning open source work into social networking... on a proprietary platform (because open source is great, especially when it's others' software). That was before they joined Microsoft.

And then Microsoft pushed AI everywhere, including on GitHub itself with copilot.

I would have liked if they had left the open source projects alone and didn't create that FOMO for not using them.

I have no sympathy.

But we pay enterprise license and GitHub is a big dependency in our software flow.

If this continues to be a problem as an enterprise product they need to do something. Otherwise theyre are going to to start losing business

I used to be on-call in a high-traffic environment where single customers pushed more bits than entire nations. I chose the role. I didn't want people's sympathy, if anything, I wanted them to complain to management.

If it gets too bad they can quit. Maybe that would be for the best, just wear the thing down until it outright fails and no one wants to touch it. One less bullshit service sucking all of the oxygen out.

I've started suggesting to my CTO that we move to something else because we do pay the Github bills and yet we are also affected by other people's activity. Avoiding that is not a hard engineering problem for an alternative.

A world where a record amount of code is pushed to GH but a large amount of paying customers leave would be "cooked"

    const incidents = e.detail.incidents;
    
    // ...snip...
    
    const now = new Date();
    const threeMonthsAgo = new Date(now);
    threeMonthsAgo.setMonth(threeMonthsAgo.getMonth() - 3);
    
    // ...snip...
    
    var currentFreq = recentIncidents.length / 3; // <- We out here, smoking these guns with our homeboy Claude
    
    // ...snip...
    
    var earliest = null;
    for (var j = 0; j < incidents.length; j++) {
      var dd = new Date(incidents[j].started_at); // <- eventually incidents[j].started_at is "2016-03-01T07:07:37.000Z"
      if (!earliest || dd < earliest) earliest = dd;
    }
    
    // ...snip...
    
    document.getElementById('n-since').textContent = earliest
      ? earliest.toLocaleDateString('en-US', { month: 'long', year: 'numeric' })
      : '?';
    document.getElementById('n-rate').textContent = Math.round(currentFreq * 10) / 10;

#n-rate has nothing to do with the #n-since month, it's just the last trailing 3 months. And even then, it's sort of underbaked? It's moving the date back by 3 calendar months not taking into account differing numbers of days, so it'll under-report short months.

I wouldn't trust the stats here.

Edit: whoops, author updated the template while I was writing this! It now says "Over the last 3 months", though that's still calendar months.

    GitHub has had 1125 incidents since March 2016. Over the last 3 months, they've averaged 24 incidents per month

Looks like they fixed it already

1. Hates the status quo

2. Only uses a handful of the 10,000 features the status quo has

3. Uses a different handful than everyone else

Because that model kept Excel as the center of buisnesses around the world for 30 years and counting

GitHub Actions is god-awful. Have you ever used any other CI tools?

you are the problem

And it may be even worse in EDT, which is currently in effect!

The contribution graph as an outage calendar idea is a commonly recurring one :). I definitely saw it somewhere else as a static asset first before I made this site.