Another GitHub outage in the same day

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Self-hosting and Alternatives

  • Many commenters say recent outages make GitHub feel like a cloud/platform dependency, not “just SaaS,” and are moving or considering moves to self‑hosted Git.
  • Forgejo and Gitea are praised as lightweight, resource‑friendly options; Forgejo is described as a fork of Gitea and often recommended as the default for self‑hosting.
  • GitLab is widely used both hosted and on‑prem; people like its integrated CI and registries, but criticize pricing and key features (SSO, codeowners, mandatory reviews, merge queues) being paywalled.
  • Some argue self‑hosting is now straightforward (especially with AI help) and more reliable for small–medium teams, if you’re willing to handle backups and ops.

Perceived Decline in GitHub Reliability and UX

  • Long‑time users report more frequent partial outages, slow UIs, PRs taking seconds to become interactive, flaky timelines, and throttling (429s) on APIs and Actions.
  • Several say GitHub used to be “fantastic” and snappy; now it “barely works” for common workflows, especially large PRs and issues.

React Frontend and Performance

  • Many blame the React/front‑end rewrite for sluggishness and huge DOMs, noting the old server‑rendered + pjax UI felt faster.
  • Others argue React isn’t the root cause, but acknowledge the new diff/PR experience can freeze browsers on large diffs and feels worse than before.

Microsoft, Azure Migration, and Strategy

  • Repeated theme: “this is what happens after Microsoft buys things” – claims of cost‑cutting, enshittification, and prioritizing Azure migration and Copilot over core reliability.
  • Some link outages to the ongoing move from GitHub’s colos to Azure; others insist the platform’s architecture/front‑end bloat is the real problem and cloud choice is secondary.
  • There’s concern that GitHub, now under a “CoreAI” org, is subordinating its core forge product to AI mandates.

AI, Copilot, and Load

  • Mixed views on Copilot: some find it weaker than other LLM tools; others say it’s acceptable but not state‑of‑the‑art.
  • Several speculate that “vibe coding” and agents (auto‑creating branches, PRs, CI runs) have dramatically increased repo and CI activity, possibly stressing GitHub’s systems; others dispute extreme “100x” growth claims.
  • Irony is noted: AI both helps people self‑host and may be contributing to GitHub’s instability.

CI/CD Coupling, Lock-in, and Resilience

  • Many argue bundling CI/CD, issues, and registry into the forge creates lock‑in and brittle pipelines: when GitHub is down, deploys stop.
  • Suggested mitigations: mirror critical repos to secondary hosts, cache dependencies, maintain manual deploy runbooks, or use standalone CI services.
  • Some defend integrated platforms (GitHub, GitLab) as worth the convenience, especially for smaller teams.

Other Platforms and Comparisons

  • Azure DevOps is heavily criticized as visually crude, unloved, and feature‑limited (e.g., 4k‑char PR descriptions, SSH key limits), though some appreciate that Microsoft mostly leaves it alone.
  • GitLab gets both praise (best CI some have used) and criticism (slow, outages too, half‑baked security/AI features, rising cost).

Meta: Status Pages and Normalization

  • Commenters note GitHub’s status page often lags real incidents, eroding trust in official communication and monitoring.
  • Several reference a “normalization of deviance”: users grudgingly accepting near‑zero‑9s reliability from a critical piece of infrastructure.