GitHub is having issues now
Frequent outages at GitHub, including a recent incident where issues and pull requests intermittently appeared empty or failed to load, are eroding confidence in the platform’s reliability for critical development workflows. Commenters link the instability to factors such as migration to Microsoft Azure, rapid rollout of AI-driven features, and increased automated traffic from coding agents. Many are now advocating for or migrating to self-hosted Git forges and alternatives like Gitea, Forgejo, GitLab, Codeberg, and SourceHut to reduce reliance on a single, failure-prone hub for open source and commercial projects.
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.