> Update - primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues
Notice odd behavior on GitHub. Get gaslit by a green status page. Notice more odd behavior on GitHub. Think it must be me this time. See unusual action queuing. Ah, an incident on the status page. Go for a walk and check HN on my phone. The AI SDLC.
That's what I don't understand. They could mitigate their name so much if they just split free/paid/enterprise. It's already shown that enterprise is much more estable and is largely unaffected from service disruptions. Why don't they go one more layer? For sure it's worth the extra complexity.
Depending on the cause of the current issues, that move would likely cause more harm to paid services than good.
Their last postmortem made clear that their challenges are operational. Scale puts pressure on operation, but it's not what blocks them from keeping up.
Doubling the operation doubles the operational challenges.
There is no such thing as "just split" there is 20+ years of legacy decisions and even if the split is relatively clean it is still probably 1 years work for 200 people for maybe a marginal improvement.
The real money is going to go towards, "make this all more reliable".
“GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency” is hosted on separate infrastructure and dedicated subdomains under *.ghe.com. It’s been around since November 2024z
It’s not the same thing as GitHub Enterprise Cloud hosted on the shared global network on github.com.
So confusing and so Microsoft. They love to have licensing so complicated their own sales people aren't up to date and have to rely on third party spreadsheets.
Edit:
Read that document - why do more people not do the self hosted option with GitHub Enterprise Server ?
At the point you are self hosting, you have many more options ranging from a simple ssh git server with pick your favorite cicd, to gitlab ce, to forgejo, and more.
Just to be clear, I am on Github Enterprise, and am also experiencing this disruption both privately and publicly on every org and project I have access to.
I'm told that GitHub has asserted to us that moving to this model means we would not be exposed to github.com outages. It's not at feature parity with github.com though.
We're currently on "GitHub Enterprise Cloud" on github.com and are affected by this outage (even though we use self-hosted runners!), but we're not on "GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency" on *.ghe.com, which I understand is/may not be affected by this outage?
This is what they've told us. It's represented as basically a separate deployment of the entire GHEC stack, so you're not exposed to the load/scaling issues they believe are the underlying cause of all the github.com outages today.
A lot of the stability problems come from trying to scale a free product on a still WIP cloud solution without costing too much; the same software running on separate, paid for infra has a lot better odds.
Meaningful is subjective, but yes I do. It was very stable for many years, and I do believe the recent issues are mostly or all because they were caught flat-footed by the rapid AI-driven load increases.
This has been a bad time, though. I'm ready to move back to self-hosting if they can't get it together or we move to GHDR and it's still bad.
It would probably be better to run projects with extremely high commit/merge frequency on a separate "slop infrastructure", basically like MMOs move cheaters to their own servers ;)
Another useful disclaimer: all of these lets the developers push updates to your computer as they wish by default in most setups, these days you might want to decrease that kind of attack surface and just check the status in the official website when "git push" suddenly stop working. Especially when extensions and stuff sometimes changes hand and it's kind of hard to keep track of it, except for when something bad happens and gets news attention.
I'm also not sure why you'd share links to software you don't even recommend yourself? Isn't it better to just not share that then? I think others could use search engine/LLM too if they need whatever, but most generally expect things shared in the comments here to actually at least have been looked at by the person sharing them.
> "Why would you recommend extensions to do this?"
This is not my complaint though, my complain is:
Why would you recommend extensions you haven't tried nor even read about yourself?
The goal isn't to pick apart the message to piss someone off, the goal is prevent someone else than the author from getting hacked because they install some random extension, not understanding what kind of access you're giving others when doing so.
They didn't recommend the extensions. They linked them because they were "merely sharing to build on for this discussion".
Is all content in HN supposed to be professional and serious, or are humorous comments in fact allowed when discussing a market leading company who has had regular outages for a year and a half? (Yes, I know the actual reasons why GitHub are struggling.)
> Is all content in HN supposed to be professional and serious
No
> are humorous comments in fact allowed
Yes
Neither is what's going on here. It's reckless to share stuff you haven't even looked at yourself, that's fairly basic thing to care about. Sharing "here's a bunch of random GitHub repositories" isn't humor (I think?) nor would it been different if the text was "more professional and serious", whatever that means.
Why you so mad about someone trying to help others from getting hacked? Install all extensions you want, based on what someone recommend or what you find randomly on YouTube, but let others be educated about what that means for their own security, not sure who that hurts and why you'd wanna stop it.
I found it quite funny that people develop extensions that track the availability of one of the most important building blocks of the software industry, because their reliability is so poor.
You could have posted a warning to not actually install random extensions. Instead you came across as questioning why anyone would post links to them at all. The poster was clear they didn't actually recommend the extensions. Sharing stuff is fun, and hardly any software posted to HN is professionally reviewed beforehand anyway.
> The poster was clear they didn't actually recommend the extensions. Sharing stuff is fun
Sharing stuff we know are good is fun. Sharing just random stuff? No, why would you do that? The whole point is why would you share those extensions if you don't actually recommend them? It's noise, the opposite of why we all come here in the first place.
Do you also just submit whatever to HN as link submissions, without even reading it or checking it yourself?
... I intended to indicate more a Quantity concept, the existence of these links is to suggest that there is additional interest and effort out there in the human universe of developers, that this whole GitHub disruption services issue is worsening and we all here on this Hacker News thread are trodding a somewhat well-worn path.
And I apologize for not making that conclusion in my comment so as to stave off spinning out a tangential discussion unnecessarily.
Yes it's reckless to say that I trust these browser extensions and GitHub repos with my private information.
In this circumstance, and somewhat ironically because of the actual issue at hand of us not being able to trust GitHub when we need to trust GitHub in order to get through our daily triage burdens, but in this circumstance, I wrote that I did not trust these.
So, I'm sorry for the confusion that it's causing, but it's really an indicator, showing that other people are experiencing frustration around the friction between they themselves realizing something is not working, and them resolving the issue after going through a potentially lengthy process to figure out that it actually is their source control and remote developer automation tooling that is failing them.
So I didn't put that conclusion in my comment.
When you two, in this thread, talk about humor on hacker News, I see where you're going. I really should have just put a conclusion in my comment so that it staved off the wandering to help make my comment more comprehensible, more quickly.
Sorry to have blown as much mental energy as it did, obviously resulting in an unwelcome and toxic result.
Thank you Tim, yes, merely sharing is what I was doing.
I didn't say, and I probably should have said, "Use the fact that there are a number of these developer focused IDE/ browser extension tools as motivating information, about the emerging need to support human developers in there daily triage burdens, as is it's arguably a need .. a trend that is worsening."
> why you'd share links to software you don't even recommend yourself?
Overall, I disagree and think it's valid and responsible to share links to apps if I disclaimed that I don't recommend installing their linked applications in an environment that has access to private data.
One valid reason, to share links, is to illustrate that there are more than zero efforts to address this issue - the parent comment issue - through and even more convenient practice than firing up a web browser, following link, waiting for it to load, reviewing the material, to see if GitHub status is red or green today. So this reason attempts to build up the importance of the parent comment's idea, and suggests that legitimate verifiable work is advisable, to continue down that path of making it more convenient for developers have simpler, more human indicators about the reliability of their digital tools.
I have tabs from like 6 months ago. Modern browsers have gotten pretty good at hibernating unused tabs and restore when needed. And this website is extremely light, it gets restored in milliseconds.
The browser history contains a lot of junk and I don't want that saved forever. Curated tab history is a bit different. It's stupid for sure, but also a bit comforting to keep the most important articles and such. For anything I really care about, there's always ArchiveBox.
As a joke I built an extension to the GitHub CLI called “omens” so you can run “gh omens” before you’re planning to use GitHub and it’ll tell you if it’s likely to work in idiomatic Aussie.
They really are bin chickens for a reason. I remember in Lakemba in Sydney watching a young child trying to shoo an ibis from a bin where it was having its lunch.
For a very long time I believed that they had migrated from Egypt because of their long beak - I think I asked my Mum once and she in tiredness just affirmed it.
> We've identified an issue with a database primary and are failing over to a replica immediately
This is why it's hard to take GitHub seriously. How can a single database cause an outage for everyone? This is amateur stuff. Have they no sharding or partitioning internally? Paying customers should not be impacted in the same way as free ones are.
RDBMS replication and failover is way more difficult and manual than anyone would like. You can't just set up two postgres, tell them they're clustered and have it basically work; at a minimum you have to design the client to somehow know which one is currently the master, or use some sort of proxy (which becomes its own SPOF).
RDBMS integrity basically requires that one master server is responsible for the whole data set and other servers may replicate from it. And it usually doesn't wait for a quorum of replicas, just for one, because the design is to recover from a hardware failure, not a network partition, although that could be fixed at the cost of increased latency.
This can be implemented in front of any RDBMS as a separate layer. Traditionally they weren't designed for quorum-sensing since it hadn't been invented yet. I'd be surprised if something like pgbouncer couldn't do it.
> primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues
Did you not read it? Just because there's a database primary doesn't mean there is 1 primary database. There's likely man redundancies and they have issue with how they're allocating traffic to them which is in turn causing an issue with how much traffic redundancies are receiving.
I spent a bunch of time during the outage last week setting up forgejo and some custom action runners. At the time, I was worried I was wasting time and getting distracted from my real work...alas, I guess not. Gonna finish up that work and complete the move today.
>Update - primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues
And now they're blaming their upstream vendor! Embarrassing stuff to be writing on a public page.
Vitess is a distributed mysql database. Github could very well be managing it entirely on their own. I have only seen people managing their own vitess, its entirely open source afaik.
Things can go wrong, but really, its been a lot and we're normalizing that to an unhealthy degree...
I wonder if it was down that much, if users would get credits the way we pay when we use the services - its kind of ridiculous for a critical service to be down that much and all we do is "ah okay, its just github". Like, as if that was normal to be down that much...
At the time, most email was either local to the host (big mainframe in the basement) or transferred once a day through scheduled dial-up connections during off-peak phone hours
I saw an application once about 25 years ago that was built on SMTP for communication. I think it was an inter library loan system, but can't remember for sure. I was a pretty smart way of not having to worry much about redundancy in the communications.
I don't think it's been "normalized". Github uptime is literally a joke in the tech community. They have first mover advantage and a behemoth behind them so they're not going away, but everyone knows how shit it's uptime is. It takes time for organizations to move away from services like this but I would bet anything that many are starting to try to move away, as well as new companies knowing they shouldn't use the service.
Azure's going to suffocate github. I'm curious to see what's next. Will self-hosting the code repository come back in vogue or will another social-coding platform take off?
If you're actively considering self hosting, I recommend giving forgejo a try. The experience is much more similar to what GitHub offers, actions API is nearly identical to name one similarity of which there are many. Moving essentially becomes one prompt and a coffee later for a small team.
What do you need real anchors for? Sharing of pipelines?
Maybe I’ve been burned too much by pipeline maintenance (because we didn’t have yaml anchors?) but I rather have builds defined in make /bazel/etc than in yaml. So the only thing the pipeline does is optionally restoring caches, kicking off the build system, uploading PR validation results, and saving cache. Pushing artifact etc is all done from inside the build system.
There is no “setup” like installing packages because we make the build image seperately.
I find this recommendation funny, because I completely agree from a sysadmin perspective.
I used to use Gitlab at work, and small teams would run into so many footguns with CI that we had to throw up guardrails to prevent mistakes. Far too many links to gitlab issues that were not fixed even after >8+ years of being open ended up biting us. With GHA I haven't had that experience, and same for all of my self hosted Forgejo instances. I used to hate using GHA from about ~2018 to 2021, but they've fixed a lot of things I disliked since then.
probably not. The people that have done it before or willing to do it now is probably a very % of the commit volume, they leaving wouldn't change much, probably not gonna even move the exponential growth needle.
We should worry less about what everyone else uses, and more about what we use. I'm self-hosting Gitea and thinking of upgrading to Forgejo. What are you using?
Common Name (CN) www.dayswithoutgithubincident.com
Organization (O) <Not Part Of Certificate>
Common Name (CN) YR1
Organization (O) Let's Encrypt
Issued On Monday, August 10, 2026 at 10:01:51 AM
Expires On Sunday, November 8, 2026 at 9:01:50 AM
Seems like a weird thing to post on a status page. Shouldn't this have happened automatically and therefore precluded the need to inform users of it?
Their last postmortem made clear that their challenges are operational. Scale puts pressure on operation, but it's not what blocks them from keeping up.
Doubling the operation doubles the operational challenges.
The real money is going to go towards, "make this all more reliable".
It’s not the same thing as GitHub Enterprise Cloud hosted on the shared global network on github.com.
https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/dat...
Edit:
Read that document - why do more people not do the self hosted option with GitHub Enterprise Server ?
I'm told that GitHub has asserted to us that moving to this model means we would not be exposed to github.com outages. It's not at feature parity with github.com though.
We're currently on "GitHub Enterprise Cloud" on github.com and are affected by this outage (even though we use self-hosted runners!), but we're not on "GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency" on *.ghe.com, which I understand is/may not be affected by this outage?
This has been a bad time, though. I'm ready to move back to self-hosting if they can't get it together or we move to GHDR and it's still bad.
I wonder how much egg is on that exec's face.
Which surprised me because of the many hundreds of services I rely on regularly that also have status pages.
Uptime reliability is nkt additive, it's multiplicative, sometimes even logarithmic.
Downtime of 99% and 99% is 98.1%. I hope almost all those services are non-prod related.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/is-github-down/lcfo...
A VSCode extension:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RuslanRy...
Firefox:
https://github.com/matagus/github-status-checker
Caveat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450924
(disclaimer: none of these are recommended by me to use - merely sharing to build on for this discussion)
I'm also not sure why you'd share links to software you don't even recommend yourself? Isn't it better to just not share that then? I think others could use search engine/LLM too if they need whatever, but most generally expect things shared in the comments here to actually at least have been looked at by the person sharing them.
> It would be really cool if someone built an extension to show GitHub status live
"These already exist, why wouldn't you search before posting?"
> There exist quite a few extensions to show live GitHub status
"Why would you not post them if you know they exist?"
Or, what actually happened:
> Here are some extensions that might work for you to show live GitHub status
"Why would you recommend extensions to do this?"
Seems to me like, if your goal is to pick apart someone suggesting something, you'll find a way to.
This is not my complaint though, my complain is:
Why would you recommend extensions you haven't tried nor even read about yourself?
The goal isn't to pick apart the message to piss someone off, the goal is prevent someone else than the author from getting hacked because they install some random extension, not understanding what kind of access you're giving others when doing so.
Is all content in HN supposed to be professional and serious, or are humorous comments in fact allowed when discussing a market leading company who has had regular outages for a year and a half? (Yes, I know the actual reasons why GitHub are struggling.)
No
> are humorous comments in fact allowed
Yes
Neither is what's going on here. It's reckless to share stuff you haven't even looked at yourself, that's fairly basic thing to care about. Sharing "here's a bunch of random GitHub repositories" isn't humor (I think?) nor would it been different if the text was "more professional and serious", whatever that means.
Why you so mad about someone trying to help others from getting hacked? Install all extensions you want, based on what someone recommend or what you find randomly on YouTube, but let others be educated about what that means for their own security, not sure who that hurts and why you'd wanna stop it.
You could have posted a warning to not actually install random extensions. Instead you came across as questioning why anyone would post links to them at all. The poster was clear they didn't actually recommend the extensions. Sharing stuff is fun, and hardly any software posted to HN is professionally reviewed beforehand anyway.
Sharing stuff we know are good is fun. Sharing just random stuff? No, why would you do that? The whole point is why would you share those extensions if you don't actually recommend them? It's noise, the opposite of why we all come here in the first place.
Do you also just submit whatever to HN as link submissions, without even reading it or checking it yourself?
... I intended to indicate more a Quantity concept, the existence of these links is to suggest that there is additional interest and effort out there in the human universe of developers, that this whole GitHub disruption services issue is worsening and we all here on this Hacker News thread are trodding a somewhat well-worn path.
And I apologize for not making that conclusion in my comment so as to stave off spinning out a tangential discussion unnecessarily.
Yes it's reckless to say that I trust these browser extensions and GitHub repos with my private information.
In this circumstance, and somewhat ironically because of the actual issue at hand of us not being able to trust GitHub when we need to trust GitHub in order to get through our daily triage burdens, but in this circumstance, I wrote that I did not trust these.
So, I'm sorry for the confusion that it's causing, but it's really an indicator, showing that other people are experiencing frustration around the friction between they themselves realizing something is not working, and them resolving the issue after going through a potentially lengthy process to figure out that it actually is their source control and remote developer automation tooling that is failing them.
So I didn't put that conclusion in my comment.
When you two, in this thread, talk about humor on hacker News, I see where you're going. I really should have just put a conclusion in my comment so that it staved off the wandering to help make my comment more comprehensible, more quickly.
Sorry to have blown as much mental energy as it did, obviously resulting in an unwelcome and toxic result.
I didn't say, and I probably should have said, "Use the fact that there are a number of these developer focused IDE/ browser extension tools as motivating information, about the emerging need to support human developers in there daily triage burdens, as is it's arguably a need .. a trend that is worsening."
Overall, I disagree and think it's valid and responsible to share links to apps if I disclaimed that I don't recommend installing their linked applications in an environment that has access to private data.
One valid reason, to share links, is to illustrate that there are more than zero efforts to address this issue - the parent comment issue - through and even more convenient practice than firing up a web browser, following link, waiting for it to load, reviewing the material, to see if GitHub status is red or green today. So this reason attempts to build up the importance of the parent comment's idea, and suggests that legitimate verifiable work is advisable, to continue down that path of making it more convenient for developers have simpler, more human indicators about the reliability of their digital tools.
Pretty simple reason but that's my reason.
but I always have sense of fear that I might need it someday
but I still keep it on my browser, maybe someday I would like to fetch LLM and describe my interest over time
It could be a new Microsoft feature !
As an example:
$> gh omens
reckon github's about to go full bin chicken
—-
You can find it here: https://github.com/sandermvanvliet-stack/gh-omens
LOL is this really something Aussie's say? That’s hilarious!
Their bin-chicken status is testament to their adaptability, but it’s essentially our fault they’re that way.
This is why it's hard to take GitHub seriously. How can a single database cause an outage for everyone? This is amateur stuff. Have they no sharding or partitioning internally? Paying customers should not be impacted in the same way as free ones are.
RDBMS integrity basically requires that one master server is responsible for the whole data set and other servers may replicate from it. And it usually doesn't wait for a quorum of replicas, just for one, because the design is to recover from a hardware failure, not a network partition, although that could be fixed at the cost of increased latency.
This can be implemented in front of any RDBMS as a separate layer. Traditionally they weren't designed for quorum-sensing since it hadn't been invented yet. I'd be surprised if something like pgbouncer couldn't do it.
> primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues
Maybe you expect that part of GitHub to have a scale where a single database can't handle it, but evidently that isn't true.
We can criticise them for not splitting up free and paid customers but again, most companies don't do that.
And now they're blaming their upstream vendor! Embarrassing stuff to be writing on a public page.
I wonder if it was down that much, if users would get credits the way we pay when we use the services - its kind of ridiculous for a critical service to be down that much and all we do is "ah okay, its just github". Like, as if that was normal to be down that much...
Probably just a coincidence that Github started to have issues after beginning their move to Azure at the end of last year.
I’m not happy with the Actions API. I think Gitlab’s cicd design is much better, and I’m not fighting it all the time when I use it.
sys-admin-ing gitlab can be a bit of a maze of web menus tho.
Maybe I’ve been burned too much by pipeline maintenance (because we didn’t have yaml anchors?) but I rather have builds defined in make /bazel/etc than in yaml. So the only thing the pipeline does is optionally restoring caches, kicking off the build system, uploading PR validation results, and saving cache. Pushing artifact etc is all done from inside the build system.
There is no “setup” like installing packages because we make the build image seperately.
I used to use Gitlab at work, and small teams would run into so many footguns with CI that we had to throw up guardrails to prevent mistakes. Far too many links to gitlab issues that were not fixed even after >8+ years of being open ended up biting us. With GHA I haven't had that experience, and same for all of my self hosted Forgejo instances. I used to hate using GHA from about ~2018 to 2021, but they've fixed a lot of things I disliked since then.
But GitHub, in its heyday, was a centre. Created a sense of "community"
It has taken a while, but since MS bought it it has been shirking that. I expected honest enshittification, but instead it has been technical collapse
What ever.
IMO we need a federation protocol for Git that can rebuild some sort of "community", but on solid foundations.
So we can find one another on our self hosted instances