GitHub: Git operation failures

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Immediate impact and behavior of the outage

  • Many users report being unable to push or pull via both HTTPS and SSH, seeing errors like “ERROR: no healthy upstream”, 500/503, and 404 on raw.githubusercontent.com.
  • Authentication often still works (SSH greeting), which confused people into debugging local keys and setups.
  • GitHub Actions and external CI (e.g., CircleCI) that depend on Git operations or actions/checkout also failed.
  • Some functionality in the web UI (editing files, creating branches) continued to work, but pipelines and deployments that fetch from GitHub broke.

Reliability concerns and perceived trend

  • Strong sentiment that GitHub reliability has degraded, with multiple incidents in recent weeks, especially around Actions.
  • Several commenters say GitHub is now one of the least reliable services they use; some claim outages feel “weekly” or at least monthly.
  • Others counter that outages are not new, and that similar or worse instability existed in GitHub’s early days and across other clouds (AWS, Azure, Cloudflare).

Centralization vs decentralization

  • The outage, plus a large Cloudflare incident earlier the same day, fuels criticism of heavy reliance on a few US-based centralized providers.
  • People note that both the web and Git are fundamentally decentralized, but real workflows have been re-centralized around GitHub as a “hub” (issues, PRs, CI, stars).
  • Radicle and similar p2p/decentralized approaches are mentioned, but some find their concepts confusing or impractical.

Alternatives and self‑hosting experiences

  • GitLab (SaaS and self‑hosted), Forgejo, Gitea, Gogs, Atlassian-hosted Git, and simple SSH-to-VPS setups are discussed.
  • Multiple reports of long-term stable self‑hosted GitLab or other setups; others report scaling pains with large monorepos and Gitaly.
  • Several people say they’ve avoided all GitHub downtime by not using GitHub at all.

Suspected causes: AI, layoffs, Azure migration, complexity

  • Some blame layoffs, cost-cutting, reduced ops headcount, and “enshittification.”
  • Others speculate about AI-generated code, AI-based reviews, or “AI vibe coding” degrading quality, while skeptics note outages predate LLMs.
  • The ongoing migration from GitHub’s own hardware to Azure is widely suspected as a risk factor.
  • A few argue that system scale and accumulated complexity outstrip teams’ ability to understand and maintain the infrastructure.

Resilience and mitigation ideas

  • Suggestions include: local or on-prem git mirrors/caches, multi-provider hosting (e.g., mirroring to GitLab), treating CI as replaceable and runnable locally, and embracing self-hosted forge + CI stacks.
  • Several emphasize that git itself remains distributed; GitHub is the single point of failure because teams have tied CI/CD, issues, and collaboration to it.