GitHub was having issues

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Repeated outages at GitHub, including a recent incident that broke issues and pull requests, are raising concerns about the reliability of what many see as core infrastructure for software development. Commenters debate how much teams should depend on a single hosted platform for not just git hosting but CI/CD, issue tracking and releases, with some advocating self-hosted alternatives like GitLab, Gitea/Forgejo or more decentralized tooling. The thread also touches on Microsoft’s stewardship, missing IPv6 support, and the difficulty of dislodging GitHub given its network effects and social features.

Outage specifics and immediate reactions

  • Core problem was issues and pull requests not loading; many saw “zero issues” and joked about enjoying briefly empty backlogs.
  • Some framed it as “day one” under new management and mocked the timing; others noted outages have felt frequent for weeks.
  • A few said they were barely impacted because they can keep coding locally; others said outages block critical workflows like hotfix deployments tied to PRs and CI.

Reliability, pattern of incidents, and transparency

  • Several commenters described GitHub reliability as “abysmal” lately and linked to the status history, noting not all incidents are listed.
  • Others pushed back that while reliability is worse than they’d like, calling it “easily the most unreliable SaaS” is exaggerated, and pointed to worse experiences with Atlassian / Bitbucket or GitLab.
  • Some enterprise users encouraged demanding SLA reports and credits to create internal pressure at GitHub/Microsoft.

Centralization vs distributed git and SPOF risk

  • Many criticized the irony of centralizing on a single forge while using a distributed VCS.
  • Suggested mitigations: mirroring repos (e.g., to GitLab or a bare git+ssh server), running secondary “upstream” remotes, and regular exports.
  • GitHub’s broader role—issues, PRs, CI/CD, releases, docs, project boards—means outages are more serious than “just” git hosting.

Alternatives and self‑hosting

  • Popular self‑hosted options: Forgejo, Gitea, GitLab, plus hosted Forgejo via Codeberg; some also mentioned Tangled, Radicle, and Phorge.
  • Self‑hosting experiences ranged from “months of uptime, minutes per month of admin” (e.g., Gitea/Forgejo, GitLab) to warnings that GitLab is heavy and painful to run at scale.
  • Network effects and social/discoverability features were repeatedly cited as GitHub’s main moat, not unique features.

IPv6 and Azure concerns

  • Lack of IPv6 support was called embarrassing, forcing some to pay for IPv4.
  • One thread blamed Azure’s problematic IPv6 implementation (NATed v6, many limitations) as a likely factor.

Culture, tech stack, and AI

  • Speculation that internal pressure to ship features (including AI) on top of a large Ruby on Rails codebase contributes to fragility.
  • Some connected repeated incidents with executive churn and “vibe-coded” changes.