No idea if/when we decide to pull that bandaid but I think once we can't merge a hot fix into main because of GH being down, it'll be a big org push to replace it.
What's everyone else using? Self hosted Gitlab? Gitea?
Cost as always depends on your usage, but it will likely be less than your current cost of GitHub Actions.
2) Issues showed Not found.
Anyway, GitHub Actions for building new release has progress. Good enough.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates?filters=%5B%22Azur...
That's not necessarily a bad thing for stability, but long-term I would not be surprised if it gets EOL-ed, or radically shrunk to just a basic Git mirroring service.
Alternative theories include "azure sucks" and "they're vibecoding everything now".
Many people suspect it's the year-long migrating to Azure and all their products instead of the things they have been using.
You can use as many AI agents as you want (it won’t solve the problem), but with that many outages ever since getting bought by Microsoft, it is more than enough time to give them to change. They don’t care and there is no CEO of GitHub to help either.
A self hosted instance would have much better uptime than GitHub and GitHub Actions at this point as I predicted 6 years ago. [1]
Looking at a unicorn page, I feel this lingering hope that it's transient (like it usually was in the old days) but my mind reassures me it's probably going to be a long full outage again.
The hope is dead.
But maybe I’m wrong?
Anyone here have data on whether the likes of gitlab have been impacted in the same was as github?
But I’m more lenient with codeberg because they are a non-profit and as you say, they are banning vibe-coded project because of the cost to infrastructure. In the meantime, GitHub is encouraging vibe-coding, multiplication of the source code, and genAI discussions.
Or let me ask a more useful question: if we were to move, then to where? Ideally somewhere new (not Gitlab)
Gathered details on embedding request syntax from
Unicorn! · GitHub
Well it's 100% down for me, so does this mean 20% of all users are fully down?
> Posted 1 minute ago. Aug 17, 2026 - 13:58 UTC
It also took them 20 minutes to realize that peoples requests to /pull/xx are not working :D
I suppose people can use git too if they ever figure out how to send emails from a dedicated client.
Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.
Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t), go hit the gym or walk outside.
If a work tool going down triggers you enough mentally to start angrily ranting online, it’s a sign you need to chill out and focus more on your health
This should not be an excuse since they probably can use AI to fix it /partially sarcasm
It is time to give up on Github. This is just too much.
* Forgejo
Those are my favorites. Both you can self-host for your company, including CI/CD.
I started with the cloud version, then moved to self-hosted because it wasn't a big effort for our team. We also reduced our monthly invoice by about 50% after the move.
Has big tech reached a similar status like banks in that they are "too big to fail" i.e. when they do fail we all just look the other way and say: "well everyone else is out too". Didn't someone recently calculate that GitHub is running at 95%? For comparison the Irish Rail service which is not reliable has 80% of it's trains run on time.
This seems absurd and really challenges a lot of ideas I had about big tech and cloud infrastructure. GitHub seems to have remained the dominant player relative to GitLab etc.
If they make it harder to push slop on github, people might treat it as an incentive to generate less slop. Less tokens sold. Bad. Very bad.
The github paying customers are not going to move away.
Plus, it's probably genuinely hard to scale. And they can't throw compute at the problem - all compute is already going to the LLMs.
Seems like a simple solution.
Anyone else using Fossil?
Or is their point about abandoned projects where the dev never clicks release after merging, or even never merges?
I am seriously, 100%, contemplating the idea of offering consulting for migrating companies and projects out of Github. Given that I am fully employed, I'd only be able to do this on the weekends. Could I get a show of hands to get an idea of potential customers?
It's just a constant pain in the ass.
Wherever I have anything to say I prefer ANY other gitforge over this piece of shit.
I wonder how it made it onto GitHub.
Thankfully this is encouraging me to stop working overtime for now and enjoy the rest of my night
Did you have the conversation "do we need to move from $whatever CI/CD to GitHub Actions?" beforehand? What were the arguments in favour?
- It was believed that GitHub would be more reliable than our self hosted Gitlab CI runners. This has proven to be very false.
- It was believed it would be easier to write tooling. I’m not on the dev tooling team, so can’t confirm if they found it true or not, but from the outside I see a lot more “Github can’t do that” than I did “Gitlab can’t do it”
tangled.org!
I mean, that plus better uptime.
Not if you want to make sure it compiles and works on Windows (which you don't have) or macOS (which you don't have and can't emulate). That's something github gives for free, and for me, it's the only reason to stay on github for small/tiny free software projects (at least as a secondary host).
they've had multiple outages in the last week, so i guess they are proving themselves correct.
in practice, giving ssh/sudo to AI (codex) and telling it to setup ephemeral self-hosted runners on your own host VM (qemu), takes about 30 minutes and works extremely well. it bangs out all the shell scripts. moved my own business over to it. zero problems.
you might even find it is kind of neat too. you can customize your VM with software pre-installed. speeds up your builds quite a bit.
[0] https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/blacksmith-seed-announcement
Whatever the actual increase in productivity may be, the commits, clones, pushes, action runs, etc. are skyrocketing.
I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
Manager: Why is the site down!?
Engineer: Because it can’t handle this level of traffic. We can rate limit to the level we can handle to keep the service running.
Manager: Okay, let’s do that!
Engineer: Okay. Rate limiting at N req/min.
Manager: I’m getting complaints we’re denying service to customers!? We can’t rate limit our users if they want to use it. Increase the rate limits.
I’ve had this conversation more than once in my career.
Imagine the software development lifecycle is a river blocked by several dams- necessary processes that also slow the water’s volume and speed. Writing the code was a very big dam upstream, and successive dams didn’t need to handle a lot of water. With that dam busted wide open, the torrent of code is inundating downstream processes. GitHub happens to host many of them.
Earlier this year the GitHub COO shared a post on Twitter with explosive numbers they were facing. I cannot seem to find it at the moment. (Edit: shared in other replies to this thread.)
The original source was Kyle Daigle, GH COO.
They need to start getting rid of the free tiers for GitHub Actions and actually charge appropriately or increase prices for it.
I guess they're quite happy with that TBF, it doesn't seem like they're that interested in being a git forge anyway.
I suspect even poor uptime for many services is a cosmetic problem for most users.
Ever since the Twitter -> X rebranding, every time I open Twitter links, I have a very high chance of hitting a "Something went wrong" type page, with a retry button that just does nothing. It's been like this for ages. I barely open Twitter links anymore as a result.
EVERY other client I've ever worked with used their own gitforge or at least bitbucket...
Hell, even I do it.
But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house.
And I don't think that GitHub is devoid of SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.
My significant other was just let go from their job as a scapegoat for an organizational error: 3 layers of failure - IC, manager, director, and the IC was let go. The error caused a 7 figure loss for the company that has 10 figures of revenue per year. The manager and director may not see any consequences, though the director will probably be forced out by end-of-year due to incompetence. The new executive has taken to firing employees much more eagerly than their predecessor, like some sort of Jack Welch acolyte.
Their firing has put a lot of things into perspective for me. Mostly, fuck "at-will" employment and its negative effect on the American social contract.
But also this "angry ranting" online that the original poster was referencing. Not everyone has the privilege to calmly respond to things that directly impact their livelihood.
> Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t)
Oh, we do. Given the sheer number of users, it's almost guaranteed someone is on fire ever time GitHub is down. Statistics is a very charming branch of reality.
Which means they have a pricing problem. Rate limit non-paying users.
I sympathized with them when they said this a handful of months ago, but then I saw this [0] page that shows how it's been shot for years prior (which tracks with my memory).
I feel for the GH engineers that have to deal with this, especially the SREs. I also don't hate the downtime right now, as I'll make a cup of coffee and do something else. I will say though, I did have a hotfix a week or so ago during the Actions outage, which really was a pain.
You're right that getting angry and ranting isn't the right reaction here, but I do no give them the LLM load excuse. I don't give them an out for having awful uptime during work hours for a product we pay quite a bit for as an org.
This is the outcome of violating single responsibility principle in business.
Or, maybe your #1 IT priority was moving everything to Azure instead ;)
My mind immediately went to this classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/303/
The idea that we should be fine with this unreliability is just amazing. It's not a mental health issue to have problems when important infra fails.
the comment doesnt say you should be "fine" with the unreliability.
they are saying people shouldnt get so emotionally worked up over it. which, while i wouldn't phrase it in the way the parent did, i agree with the direction of their point.
However, your "(you don't)" comment is not going to calm down all the people, who, you know, DO have a hotfix to push now, and DO have an angry customer that could not care less for which part of our infrastructure is breaking _their_ workflow.
The only things would calm everyone down is guarantee that Microsoft would be paying for _our_ SLA breach compensation. But they don't. And I don't think anyone is paying their GH bill with a prorata of the number of time the platform was actually available.
(I'm also aware that the wording of the contract probably clearly says that you should not use GitHub for anything critical, that Microsoft is only a small startup in their garage, that you can't credibly expect 90% uptime anyway, and that it's all the fault of LLM slop ! Bad LLM slop ! Also, please buy our LLMs to generate more slop, please.)
Is this rage bait? Isn't Google, Amazon, and all the other services in the world similarly impacted by LLM's? Isn't Claude, OpenAI, etc.? Why can they handle the load but not Github?
Which they encouraged by pushing Copilot down everyone's throat
I’m not a Meta fan but it’s interesting that they manage to keep their systems up with an order of magnitude more traffic. GitHub’s uptime is inexcusable.
github enterprise is fully operational at the moment
They could easily tighten things up in that regard, and make a choice that is right for their main users at the expense of The MS corpo mandate/mission. It is a choice to do otherwise.
Github and their parent company are active participants in pushing LLM-driven coding.
I have little time in my day to spend with my daughter. But I also have responsibilities. And one client has decided to bet on github. It's the only client I've ever worked with who has their code on github. EVERY other client has hosted their own gitforge or used bitbucket.
So now I am not angry because some critical piece of US-american infrastructure is down all the time.
I am angry because instead of spending time with my daughter I have to work on this later, because there are due dates and "Well, fucking GitHub was down" ain't gonna cut it.
lol768•41m ago
Interestingly the API still works for creating an issue (but webhooks weren't fired).