GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

pilif

see also: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a... A migration like this is a monumental undertaking to the level of where the only sensible way to do a migration like this is probably to not do it. I fully expect even worse reliability over the next few years before it'll get better.

embedding-shape

From GitHub CTO in 2025 when they announced they're moving everything to Azure instead of letting GitHub's infrastructure remain independent: > For us, availability is job #1, and this migration ensures GitHub remains the fast, reliable platform developers depend on That went about as well as everyone thought back then. Does anyone else remember back in ~2014-2015 sometime, when half the community was screaming at GitHub to "please be faster at adding more features"? I wish we could get back to platforms (or OSes for that matter) focusing in reliability and stability. Seems those days are long gone.

Eikon

As of recently (workflows worked for months) I even have part of my CI on actions that fails with [0] 2026-02-27T10:11:51.1425380Z ##[error]The runner has received a shutdown signal. This can happen when the runner service is stopped, or a manually started runner is canceled. 2026-02-27T10:11:56.2331271Z ##[error]The operation was canceled. I had to disable the workflows. GitHub support response has been “ We recommend reviewing the specific job step this occurs at to identify any areas where you can lessen parallel operations and CPU/memory consumption at one time.” That plus other various issues makes me start to think about alternatives, and it would have never occurred to me one year back. [0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS/actions/runs/22480743922/job...

sammy2255

I wonder if they are still running on a single MySQL machine

rvz

Ever since Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub 8 years ago, GitHub has completely enshittified and has become so unreliable, that even self-hosting a Git repository or self-hosted actions yourself would have a far better uptime than GitHub. This sounded crazy in 2020 when I said that in [0]. Now it doesn't in 2026 and many have realized how unreliable GitHub has become. If there was a prediction market on the next time GitHub would have at least one major outage per week, you would be making a lot of money since it appears that AI chatbots such as Tay.ai, Zoe and Copilot are somewhat in charge of wrecking the platform. Any other platform wouldn't tolerate such outages. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

_pdp_

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47315878

_heimdall

I'm surprised GitHub got by acting fairly independently inside Microsoft for so long. I'm also surprised GitHub employees expected that to last The real problem today IMO is that Microsoft waited so long to drop the charade that they now felt like they had to rip the bandaid. From what I've heard the transition hasn't gone very smoothly at all, and they've mostly been given tight deadlines with little to no help from Microsoft counterparts.

bentobean

“Microsoft Tentacle” - Now there’s a name for a new product line.

yurii_l

Maybe they need to improve release strategy with Copilot AI Review =)

cedws

While GitHub obsess over shoving AI into everything, the rest of the platform is genuinely crumbling and its security flaws are being abused to cause massive damage. Last week Aqua Security was breached and a few repositories it owns were infected. The threat actors abused widespread use of mutable references in GitHub Actions, which the community has been screaming about for years, to infect potentially thousands of CI runs. They also abused an issue GitHub has acknowledged but refused to fix that allows smuggling malicious Action references into workflows that look harmless. GHA can’t even be called Swiss cheese anymore, it’s so much worse than that. Major overhauls are needed. The best we’ve got is Immutable Releases which are opt in on a per-repository basis.

pluc

I'm amazed Microslop let us keep GitHub this long. Probably because they're training AI on it? To have a direct line to developers? I don't see why else they would've bothered with something that was so anti everything they stood for

martinald

I wonder how much of this is down to the massive amount of new repos and commits (of good or bad quality!) from the coding agents. I believe that the App Store is struggling to keep up with (mostly manual tbf) app reviews now, with sharp increases in review times. I find it hard to believe that an Azure migration would be that detrimental to performance, especially with no doubt "unlimited credit" to play with? You can provision Linux machines easily on Azure and... that's all you need? Or is the thinking that without bare metal NVMe mySQL it can't cope (which is a bit of a different problem tbf).

cl0ckt0wer

Cheap, fast, and good. I see which two they chose.

mikeve

Just to add a little bit of nuance to this not because I'm trying to defend GitHub, they definitely need to up their reliability, but the 90% uptime figure represents every single service that GitHub offers being online 90% of the time. You don't need every single service to be online in order to use GitHub. For example, I don't use Copilot myself and it's seen a 96.47% uptime, the worst of the services which are tracked.

dijit

I’m surprised it’s even as high as three nines, at one point in 2025 it was below 90%; not even a single nine.[0] (which, to be fair includes co-pilot, which is the worst of availabilities). People on lobsters a month ago were congratulating Github on achieving a single nine of uptime.[1] I make jokes about putting all our eggs in one basket under the guise of “nobody got fired for buying x; but there are sure a lot of unemployed people”- but I think there’s an insidious conversation that always used to erupt: “Hey, take it easy on them, it’s super hard to do ops at this scale”. Which lands hard on my ears when the normal argument in favour of centralising everything is that “you can’t hope to run things as good as they do, since there’s economies of scale”. These two things can’t be true simultaneously.. this is the evidence. [0]: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ [1]: https://lobste.rs/s/00edzp/missing_github_status_page#c_3cxe...

iwontberude

Three nines is more than enough

amelius

It's time to look for a decentralized Non-Hub alternative.

William_BB

To me, Github has always seemed well positioned to be a one-stop solution for software development: code, CI/CD, documentation, ticket tracking, project management etc. Could anyone explain where they failed? I keep hearing that Github is terrible

kgwxd

Just use git, problem solved.

Alifatisk

Have anyone checked out the status page? It's actually way worse than I thought, I believe this is the first time I am actually witnessing a status page with truly horrible results. https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses