GitHub is having issues now

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Outage symptoms and user experience

  • Issues, PRs, releases, stars filtering, projects, and Actions views intermittently show zero results or “no items,” despite content existing.
  • Pages sometimes load correctly after repeated refreshes, implying only some servers are healthy.
  • Failures are often “silent”: lists appear empty rather than showing clear errors, which users view as dangerous and misleading.
  • Some users report partial data (not all PRs) even when lists load.
  • Official status characterizes this as “intermittent,” but several commenters say failures are ~90% of page loads.

Perceived reliability trends

  • Many feel GitHub outages have become weekly or “evergreen,” with the last 6–12 months called out as notably worse.
  • Shared third-party uptime charts and historical links are used to argue reliability has degraded; others note pre-acquisition outages existed but may have been under-tracked.
  • There is criticism that postmortems are rare or shallow given outage frequency.

Speculated causes

  • Migration from GitHub’s own datacenters to Azure is frequently blamed; some suggest Azure itself is unstable or overloaded.
  • Several tie issues to increased AI usage: Copilot features, AI-generated code volume, and coding agents hammering the platform.
  • Some commenters generalize that modern practices (shipping faster, less testing, AI-assisted coding) lead to more production bugs.

Impact on teams and business

  • Outages delay deployments and releases; some teams explicitly postpone production changes.
  • Enterprise migrations from self-hosted GitLab or internal Git servers to GitHub are now viewed as risky, especially when profit is tied to tight release windows.

Alternatives and self‑hosting

  • Many report positive experiences with self-hosted Gitea, Forgejo, GitLab, gitolite+cgit, Gerrit, and SourceHut, citing:
    • Better perceived uptime and performance.
    • Lower or more predictable cost.
  • CI is highlighted as the hardest part to replace; GitHub Actions is still seen as strong, but Gitea/Forgejo Actions and Woodpecker are mentioned as viable.
  • Some mirror code to multiple forges to reduce GitHub as a single point of failure; others note that migrating issues, PRs, permissions, and links is the real challenge.

Centralization and ecosystem concerns

  • Several argue GitHub’s central role makes its outages disproportionately harmful to the global dev ecosystem.
  • There is tension between the convenience/social network of a single popular forge and the resilience benefits of diversification and decentralization.