Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Visualization and Overall Reception

  • The site turns GitHub incidents into a “red square” contribution-style graph.
  • Many find it clever, ironic, and visually effective; the intensity gradient is praised.
  • Some criticize it as “vibe-coded” and potentially misleading by maximizing red.

Weekday vs Weekend Outage Pattern

  • Clear pattern: many more incidents on weekdays; weekends are mostly green.
  • People joke that GitHub should deploy only on weekends or that “leaving it alone” makes it stable.
  • Several suggest this is due to both higher load and more changes during workdays.
  • Some note better AI and Copilot responsiveness at night or on weekends, aligning with lower load.

Hypothesized Causes of Outages

  • Strong theme: most outages are caused by changes, not pure traffic, especially with frequent deploys.
  • Others emphasize load and recent explosion in AI/agent-generated commits and GitHub usage.
  • Some argue AI is a red herring; they recall problems predating the AI boom.
  • Debate over whether Microsoft’s tech stack and Azure migration are contributing factors; status is unclear.

Status Pages, Metrics, and SLA Games

  • Big contrast noted between official status page and third‑party trackers.
  • Several point out the historical uptime graph seems inconsistent with incident logs.
  • Third‑party pages may:
    • Count minor AI model issues as full outages.
    • Aggregate per‑component downtime to >24h per day.
  • Others argue official pages under‑report incidents to protect SLAs.
  • Enterprise customers report GitHub doesn’t proactively track SLA breaches; customers must log and chase credits, which are often trivial.

Enterprise vs Public GitHub

  • Some claim GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency (separate ghe.com domains) shows better uptime than public github.com.
  • Others using enterprise report frequent issues, especially with PRs and Actions.
  • It’s unclear how much of the code/infra is shared between public and various enterprise offerings.

Self‑Hosting and Alternatives

  • Several commenters advocate self‑hosting (e.g., Forgejo, Codeberg, Drone CI) for better control and reliability.
  • Recent GitHub Actions outages are a particular pain point for teams who just migrated from other CI systems.

Meta‑Discussion and Culture

  • Repeated meme sites and pile‑on criticism are seen by some as unconstructive bandwagoning.
  • Others stress this is a systemic management/priority failure, not an individual engineer problem.