Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived Reliability Crisis

  • Many commenters say GitHub incidents now feel weekly or even more frequent, disrupting work regularly.
  • Jokes appear about bots reposting “GitHub is down” daily, or needing a page for when GitHub is not down.
  • Shared third‑party uptime stats show very low effective availability; others argue these overcount by treating any partial outage as full downtime.
  • Some recall pre‑Microsoft GitHub as “good enough,” seeing recent instability as brand‑damaging and comparable to past Microsoft degradations of other products.

Proposed Causes: AI, Load, and Architecture

  • GitHub’s own numbers (via blog posts and exec tweets) describe a steep rise in commits and GitHub Actions minutes, tied to “agentic coding.”
  • Some believe AI agents and 24/7 “moltbots” are hammering the platform with frequent commits and CI runs, including noisy, low‑value changes.
  • Others counter that all major services face AI‑driven load, yet few show outages this often; they suspect architectural debt and poor planning instead.
  • Specific technical concerns: large Ruby on Rails monolith, MySQL/Vitess write bottlenecks, overuse of search backends (e.g., PR pages), slow migrations of webhooks and hot paths into Go, and a problematic move onto Azure.

Centralization, Lock‑In, and Alternatives

  • Several note the irony that decentralized git is bottlenecked by a centralized forge; outages mainly hurt PRs, issues, and CI/CD, not raw git.
  • Network effects, discoverability, shared auth, and tooling/gameification keep people on GitHub even as they complain.
  • Some are migrating or experimenting with GitLab (self‑hosted), Forgejo/Gitea, Codeberg, or homelab setups; others highlight that dependencies and contributors still on GitHub limit escape.
  • Enterprise/on‑prem GitHub users are said to be less affected; some predict they’ll talk to competitors if SLAs keep breaking.

Free Tier, Abuse, and Incentives

  • Heavy free‑tier usage (thousands of commits and artifacts “for $0”) is seen as unsustainable under AI load.
  • Suggestions include stricter rate limits, cutting free tiers, charging “slop” generators or high‑volume agents, or segregating free vs paid infrastructure.
  • Others warn that aggressive monetization would drive open source projects away.

Broader Reflections on Code and Tools

  • Some argue code is increasingly machine‑generated and disposable, questioning what truly needs versioning (tests, specs, or higher‑level artifacts).
  • There is debate over whether git itself is inefficient vs GitHub’s web UI/CI design being the real problem.