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Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?

I moved my company over to GH enterprise last year (from AzDO) and I'm considering moving us away to another vendor altogether as a result of the constant partial outages. Things that used to "just work" now are slow in the UI, and GH actions fail to schedule in a reasonable timeframe way more than they ever used to. I enjoy GH copilot as much as the next person, but ultimately I came to GH because I needed a git forge, and I will leave GH if the git forge doesn't work.

I second this. GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works. Even basic functionality like the timeline updating when I push commits is unreliable. The other day I opened a PR diff (not even a particularly large one) and it took fully 15 seconds after the page visually finished loading -- on a $2,000 dev machine -- before any UI elements became clickable. This happened repeatedly.

It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.

The trend of "non-functional software" is happening everywhere. See the recent articles about Copilot in Notepad, failing to start because you aren't signed in with your Microsoft Account.

We are in a future that nobody wanted.

Not quite everywhere. There's a common denominator for all of those: Microsoft.

Their business is buying good products and turning them into shit, while wringing every cent they can out of the business. Always has been.

They have a grace period of about 2-4 years after acquisition where interference is minimal. Then it ramps up. How long a product can survive once the interference begins largely depends on how good senior leadership at that product company is at resisting the interference. It's a hopeless battle, the best you can do is to lose slowly.

Things don't always ramp up after 2-4 years. Sometimes MS just kills the project or company after that period of time.

See also their moves in the gaming industry.

I for one am shocked--SHOCKED, I say!--to learn that anything bad could happen as a result of a) putting everything in "the cloud" and b) handing control over the entire world's source code to the likes of Microsoft.

Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen any kind of dire consequences?

This thread has complaints about software coming from the same supplier both degrading.

The person(s) who wanted this want Azure to get bigger and have prioritized Azure over Windows and Office, and their share price has been growing handsomely.

‘Microslop’, perhaps, but their other nickname has a $ in it for a reason.

> We are in a future that nobody wanted.

some people wanted this future and put in untold amount of money to make it happen. Hint: one of them is a rabid Tolkien fan.

the irony of Tolkien being associated with a techno-dystopia makes me nauseous

Rent seekers paradise (ft copilot)

Laughs in my own Linux distro

MS PM's wanted it, got their OKR's OK'd, got their bonuses, and moved on.

> We are in a future that nobody wanted.

Nor deserved.

Then why is it the future we have?

Let’s just say there are a couple of guys, who are up to no good. And they started making trouble in our neighborhood.

jokes aside it’s all because of hyper financial engineering. Every dollar every little cent must be maximized. Every process must be exploited and monetized, and there are a small group of people who are essentially driving all this all across the world in every industry.

It was a complete accident. Nobody could have foreseen it. We are currently experiencing the sudden discovery that Microsoft is an evil corporation and maybe putting everything in the cloud wasn't the best move after all.

So React rewrite did not help after all? Imagine, one of the largest software tool companies on Earth cannot reliably REbuild something in React. I lost count of the inconsistency issues React introduced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33576722

React isn't causing these issues.

Ya, it really was one of the most enjoyable web apps to use pre-MS. I'm sure there are lots of things that have contributed to this downfall. We certainly didn't need bullshit features like achievements.

Even just a year or two ago its web interface was way snappier. Now an issue with a non-trivial number of comments, or a PR with a diff of even just a few hundred or thousand lines of changes causes my browser to lock up.

But even clicking around tabs and whatnot is noticeably slower. It used to be incredibly snappy.

I've been a GitHub user since the very early days. I had a beta invite to the service. I really wish they didn't swap out the FE for a React FE.

They need to start rolling back some of their most recent changes.

I mean, if they want people to start moving to self hosted GitLab, this is gonna get that ball rolling.

GitLab is slower for me than that React GH app. Why would I move to GitLab?

> GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works.

it's almost as if Microsoft bought it, isn't it?

We loved Github as a product when it needed to return or profit beyond "getting more users".

I feel this is just the natural trajectory for any VC-funded "service" that isn't actually profitable at the time you adopt it. Of course it's going to change for the worse to become profitable.

GitHub isn't VC funded at the moment, though. It's owned by Microsoft. Not that this necessarily changes your point.

I don’t get it. Why making the UI shittier would possibly lead to more profit?

“ I enjoy GH copilot as much as the next person”

So not at all?

Really? I’d be interested to hear more.

Disclaimer: I work in Microsoft (albeit in a quite disconnected part of it, nothing to do with GitHub or Copilot).

That does seem to be the implication, yes. :D

Github used to publish some pretty interesting postmortems. Maybe they still do. IIRC that they were struggling with scaling their SQL db and were starting to hit the limits. It's a tough position to be in because you have to either to a massive migration to a data layer with much different semantics, or you have to keep desperately squeezing performance and skirting on the edge of outages with a DB that wasn't really meant to handle what you're doing with it now. The OpenAI blog post on "scaling" Postgres to their current scale has much the same flavor, although I think they're doing it better than Github appears to be doing.

> Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?

It's Microsoft. A reliable product is not a reasonable expectation.

Not going to happen. This is terminal decline. Next step is to kill off free repos, and then they'll start ratcheting up the price to the point that they have one small dedicated engineering team supporting each customer they have. They will have exactly one customer. At some point they'll end up owned by Broadcom, OpenText, Rocket, or Progress.

> Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?

They claim that is what they are doing right now. [1]

[1] https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

Zero indication that migrating to azure will improve stability over the colos they are in now. The outages aren’t caused by the datacenter, whatever MS execs say.

Wasn't the last one even caused by Azure?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861842

The problem with the GH front end being an unbelievably bloated mess will not be even slightly improved by moving to Azure.

"Migrating to Azure" is, unfortunately, often the opposite of "delivering a reliable product".

Maybe take the initiative and move your own first? It definitely would have a bigger effect than begging here.

You might as well self-host at this point as that is far more reliable than depending on GitHub.

Additionally, there is no CEO of GitHub this time that is going to save us here.

So as I said many years ago [0] in the long term, a better way is to self host or use alternatives such as Codeberg or GitLab which at least you can self host your own.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

As an aside, God, Azure DevOps, what a total pile of crap that product is

My "favourite" restriction that an Azure DevOps PR description is limited to a pathetic 4000 characters.

My favourite restriction is the fact that colored text doesn't work in dark mode. Why? Because whatever intern they had implement dark mode didn't understand how CSS works, and just slapped !important on all the style changes that make dark mode dark, and thus overwrite the color data.

I ended up writing a browser extension for my team to fix it, because the boss loved to indicate stuff with red/green text.

Amazon's deprecated CodeCommit is limited to 150 chars like it's an old SMS or Tweet.

Ha! Nice. I never worked with CodeStar / CodeCommit. Was it pretty bad?

That's going to depend on each user's demands. The PR message limit is the biggest pain for me. I don't depend on the UI very often. I'm not trying to do any CI/CD nonsense. I just use it as a bog standard git repo. When used as that, it works just fine for me

It shows you the level of quality to expect from a Microsoft flagship cloud product...

So I work for a devtools vendor (Snyk) and 6 months ago I signed into Azure DevOps for the first time in my life

I couldn't believe it. I actually thought the product was broken. Just from a visual perspective it looked like a student project. And then I got to _using_ the damn thing

It's also completely unloved. Even MSFT Azure's own documentation regularly treats it as a second class citizen to GitHub. I have no idea why they don't just deprecate the service and officially feature freeze it.

Honestly that's the case with a lot of Azure services though.

It's the boards. GitHub issues doesn't let you do all the arcane nonsense Azure DevOps' boards let you do.

You would kind of expect with the pressure of supporting OpenAI and GitHub etc. that Azure would have been whipped into shape by now.

AZDO has been in KTLO maintenance mode for years.

I wonder if GitHub is feeling the crush of fully automated development workflows? Must be a crazy number of commits now to personal repos that will never convert to paid orgs.

IME this all started after MSFT acquired GitHub but well before vibe coding took the world by storm.

ETA: Tangentially, private repos became free under Microsoft ownership in 2019. If they hadn't done that, they could've extracted $4 per month from every vibe coder forever(!)

Live by the AI Agent hype, die by the AI Agent crush.

I was wondering about that the other day, the sheer amount of code, repos, and commits being generated now with AI. And probably more large datasets as well.

This is the real scenario behind the scenes. They are struggling with scale.

How much has the volume increased, from what you know?

Over 100x is what I’m hearing. Though that could just be panic and they don’t know the real number because they can’t handle the traffic.

An anecdote: On one project, I use a skill + custom cli to assist getting PRs through a sometimes long and winding CI process. `/babysit-pr`

This includes regular checks on CI checks using `gh`. My skill / cli are broken right now:

`gh pr checks 8174 --repo [repo] 2>&1)`

   Error: Exit code 1

   Non-200 OK status code: 429 Too Many Requests
   Body:
   {
     "message": "This endpoint is temporarily being throttled. Please try again later. For more on scraping GitHub and how it may affect your rights, please review our Terms of Service (https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service)",
     "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/graphql/using-the-rest-api/rate-limits-for-the-rest-api",
     "status": "429"
   }

So much for GitHub being a good source of training data.

Btw, someone prompt Claude code “make an equivalent to GitHub.com and deploy it wherever you think is best. No questions.”

One hundred? Did I read that right?

Yes, millions of people running code agents around the clock, where every tiny change generates a commit, a branch, a PR, and a CI run.

I simply do not believe that all of these people can and want to setup a CI. Some maybe, but even after the agent will recommend it only a fraction of people would actually do it. Why would they?

There’s a huge up tick in people who weren’t engineers suddenly using git for projects with AI.

This is all grapevine but yeah, you read that right.

I still say that mixing CI/CD with code/version control hosting is a mistake.

At it's absolute best, everything just works silently, and you now have vendor lock-in with whichever proprietary system you chose.

Switching git hosting providers should be as easy as changing your remotes and pushing. Though now a days that requires finding solutions for the MR/PR process, and the wiki, and all the extra things your team might have grown to rely on. As always, the bundle is a trap.

I don't think any of this was a mistake ;) Lock-in was by design.

We can all chill for couple weeks, Github guys take your time. Infact, don't even worry about it.

I'm starting to wonder if people doing what were previously unconventional workflows (which may not be performance optimized) are affecting things.

For example, today, I had claude basically prune all merged branches from a repo that's had 8 years of commits in it. It found and deleted 420 branches that were merged but not deleted.

Deleting 420 branches at once is probably the kind of long tail workflow that was not worth optimizing in the past, right? But I'm sure devs are doing this sort of housekeeping often now, whereas in the past, we just never would've made the time to do so.

I consider moving away from Github, but I need a solid CI solution, and ideally a container registry as well. Would totally pay for a solution that just works. Any good recommendations?

We can run a Forgejo instance for you with Firecracker VM runners on bare metal. We can also support it and provide an SLA. We're running it internally and it is very solid. We're running the runners on bare metal, with a whole lot of large CI/CD jobs (mostly Rust compilation).

The down side is that the starting price is kinda high, so the math probably only works out if you also have a number of other workloads to run on the same cluster. Or if you need to run a really huge Forgejo server!

I suspect my comment history will provide the best details and overview of what we do. We'll be offering the Firecracker runner back to the Forgejo community very soon in any case.

https://lithus.eu

Long time GitLab fan myself. The platform itself is quite solid, and GitLab CI is extremely straightforward but allows for a lot of complexity if you need it. They have registries as well, though admittedly the permission stuff around them is a bit wonky. But it definitely works and integrates nicely when you use everything all in one!

Gitea / forgejo. It supports GitHub actions.

Should our repos be responsible for CI in the first place? Seems like we keep losing the idea of simple tools to do specific jobs well (unix-like) and keep growing tools to be larger while attempting to do more things much less well (microsoft-like).

I think most large platforms eventually split the tools out because you indeed can get MUCH better CI/CD, ticket management, documentation, etc from dedicated platforms for each. However when you're just starting out the cognitive overhead and cost of signing up and connecting multiple services is a lot higher than using all the tools bundled (initially for free) with your repo.

https://nix-ci.com/

Why this and not Garnix?

GitLab, best ci i’ve ever used.

Lots of dedicated CI/CD out there that works well. CircleCI has worked for me

GitLab can be selfhosted with container based CI and fairly easy to setup CE

CE is pretty good. The things that you will miss that made us eventually pay:

* Mandatory code reviews

* Merge queue (merge train)

If you don't need those it's good.

Also it's written in Ruby so if you think you'll ever want to understand or modify the code then look elsewhere (probably Forgejo).

[dead]

At this point, GitHub outages feel closer to cloud provider outages than a SaaS blip. Curious how many people here still run self-hosted Git (GitLab / Gitea) vs fully outsourcing version control.

Yay for GitLab and Forgejo/Gitea.

My previous two startups used GitLab successfully. The smaller startup used paid-tier hosted by gitlab.com. The bigger startup (with strategic cutting-edge IP, and multinational security sensitivity) used the expensive on-prem enterprise GitLab.

(The latter startup, I spent some principal engineer political capital to move us to GitLab, after our software team was crippled by the Microsoft Azure-branded thing that non-software people had purchased by default. It helped that GitLab had a testimonial from Nvidia, since we were also in the AI hardware space.)

If you prefer to use fully open source, or have $0 budget, there's also Forgejo (forked from Gitea). I'm using it for my current one-person side-startup, and it's mostly as good as GitLab for Git, issues, boards, and wiki. The "scoped" issue labels, which I use heavily, are standard in Foregejo, but paid-tier in GitLab. I haven't yet exercised the CI features.

Self-hosted Gitea is a good time if you're comfortable taking care of backups and other self-hosting stuff.

Self hosted GitLab is absolutely worth it.

I was just looking into this today but it seems pricey. $29/user/month for basic features like codeowners and defining pr approval requirements. Going with Forgejo.

Wait, what? So you're on the hook for backups, upgrades, etc. and you have to pay them for the privilege? I thought GitLab was free as in speech and beer.

It's an Open Core model. You can deploy the free version, but it lacks some pretty important features like SSO.

But that $30 per month per user is also the cost for their cloud-hosted version. It also includes quite a bit of CI/CD runtime.

I think i will slowly start moving to self hosted git intra at my homelab.

Self-hosted git is absolutely worth it.

or forgejo!

Forgejo should 100% be people's default for self hosting

Yeah man. Forgejo (albeit it being a weird name from a language that nobody wants to use), is doing very well in my homelab.

When I worked at the univerity we used Gitea.

Every job outside of univerity I had used Gitlab self hosted. While I don't like the UI or any aspect of Gitlab a lot, it gets the job done.

I use Gitea already... I haven't seen Forejo before today. Im now curious if it is worth the switch.

Forejo was originally forked from Gitea

forgejo doesn't need half a supercomputer to run it

It would be interesting to have a graph showing AI adoption in coding against the number of weekly outages across different companies. I am sure they are quite correlated.

I bet there's other factors that are correlated as well!

Yeah, Vibe code more github!

So far it feels they are vibe coding it day and night lol…probably with GitHub Copilot

Someone needs to make an mcp server for my claude so it can check if services are down, it goes stir crazy when github is down and adds heaps of work around code =D

my four-core VPS running a Git server has higher uptime than GitHub at this point

(although admittedly less load and redundancy)

Does redundancy even matter if the end result is still poorer uptime?

I’m seeing 429s cascading downloading things like setup-buildx on self hosted runners. That seems odd/off.

Anyone else having issues? It is blocking any kind of release

I am glad I have finally started self hosting my own git server, and stop worrying about github :-)

Claude, make me an SCM provider

Sure!

Do you allow me to run the following command?

    cd project; find -type f | while read f; do mv "$f" /dev/null; done

They were talking about prioritizing migration into Azure for a long while now. Not sure this incident today is related.

https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

And coincidentally, an early CircleCI engineer wrote an article about GitHub Action (TLDR: don't use GitHub Action for CI/CD!)

https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-02-05-github-act...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46908491

> TLDR: don't use GitHub Action for CI/CD!

You should reach the same conclusion by trying to use it for this purpose, but also indeed for any purpose at all. Incidents that make you unable to deploy making all your CD efforts pointless are only the cherry on top.

Did they replace developers and devops with openclaw?

How is this "news" when it comes up multiple times a week?

It's just "yet another day of business as usual" as this point.

A great time to consider self hosting instead. Since there is no CEO of GitHub to contact anymore.

A prophecy that was predicted half a decade ago [0] which is now more important then as it is now today.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

Radicle moment.

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946827

Not quite, that one is an earlier outage while this one started at (or a bit before) 19:01 UTC.

The history for today is a bit of a mess really: https://www.githubstatus.com/history

They are all being discussed in that thread, the submitted url is just one of the various incident links on the day. Duplicate discussion.

No, it's a new outage -- that's the point! Check the URLs.

That's not the point. The point is it's a duplicate discussion of one of a number of incident links being discussed, all over there.

Remember the other day when a bunch of yous were making fun of zig moving away from GitHub? Now suddenly you all say this is not the future you wanted.

Everyday you opt in to get wrecked by Microsoft.

You all do realize you all could, for a change, learn something and never again touch anything Microsoft related?

Fool me once...

This is the predictable outcome of subordinating the GitHub product to the overarching "AI must be part of everything whether it makes sense or not" mandate coming down from the top. It was only a year ago that GitHub was moved under the "CoreAI" group at Microsoft, and there's been plenty of stories of massive cost-cutting and forcing teams to focus on AI workflows instead of their actual product priorities. To the extent they are drinking their own Kool-Aid, this sort of ops failure is also an entirely predictable outcome of too much reliance on LLM-generated code and workflows rather than human expertise, something we see happening at an alarming scale in a number of public MS repos.

Hopefully it will get bad enough fast enough that they'll recognize they need to drastically change how they are operating. But I fear we're just witnessing a slow slide into complacency and settling for being a substandard product with monopoly-power name recognition.