As a joke I built an extension to the GitHub CLI called “omens” so you can run “gh omens” before you’re planning to use GitHub and it’ll tell you if it’s likely to work in idiomatic Aussie.
They really are bin chickens for a reason. I remember in Lakemba in Sydney watching a young child trying to shoo an ibis from a bin where it was having its lunch.
For a very long time I believed that they had migrated from Egypt because of their long beak - I think I asked my Mum once and she in tiredness just affirmed it.
Another useful disclaimer: all of these lets the developers push updates to your computer as they wish by default in most setups, these days you might want to decrease that kind of attack surface and just check the status in the official website when "git push" suddenly stop working. Especially when extensions and stuff sometimes changes hand and it's kind of hard to keep track of it, except for when something bad happens and gets news attention.
I'm also not sure why you'd share links to software you don't even recommend yourself? Isn't it better to just not share that then? I think others could use search engine/LLM too if they need whatever, but most generally expect things shared in the comments here to actually at least have been looked at by the person sharing them.
> "Why would you recommend extensions to do this?"
This is not my complaint though, my complain is:
Why would you recommend extensions you haven't tried nor even read about yourself?
The goal isn't to pick apart the message to piss someone off, the goal is prevent someone else than the author from getting hacked because they install some random extension, not understanding what kind of access you're giving others when doing so.
They didn't recommend the extensions. They linked them because they were "merely sharing to build on for this discussion".
Is all content in HN supposed to be professional and serious, or are humorous comments in fact allowed when discussing a market leading company who has had regular outages for a year and a half? (Yes, I know the actual reasons why GitHub are struggling.)
> Is all content in HN supposed to be professional and serious
No
> are humorous comments in fact allowed
Yes
Neither is what's going on here. It's reckless to share stuff you haven't even looked at yourself, that's fairly basic thing to care about. Sharing "here's a bunch of random GitHub repositories" isn't humor (I think?) nor would it been different if the text was "more professional and serious", whatever that means.
Why you so mad about someone trying to help others from getting hacked? Install all extensions you want, based on what someone recommend or what you find randomly on YouTube, but let others be educated about what that means for their own security, not sure who that hurts and why you'd wanna stop it.
I found it quite funny that people develop extensions that track the availability of one of the most important building blocks of the software industry, because their reliability is so poor.
You could have posted a warning to not actually install random extensions. Instead you came across as questioning why anyone would post links to them at all. The poster was clear they didn't actually recommend the extensions. Sharing stuff is fun, and hardly any software posted to HN is professionally reviewed beforehand anyway.
> The poster was clear they didn't actually recommend the extensions. Sharing stuff is fun
Sharing stuff we know are good is fun. Sharing just random stuff? No, why would you do that? The whole point is why would you share those extensions if you don't actually recommend them? It's noise, the opposite of why we all come here in the first place.
Do you also just submit whatever to HN as link submissions, without even reading it or checking it yourself?
... I intended to indicate more a Quantity concept, the existence of these links is to suggest that there is additional interest and effort out there in the human universe of developers, that this whole GitHub disruption services issue is worsening and we all here on this Hacker News thread are trodding a somewhat well-worn path.
And I apologize for not making that conclusion in my comment so as to stave off spinning out a tangential discussion unnecessarily.
Yes it's reckless to say that I trust these browser extensions and GitHub repos with my private information.
In this circumstance, and somewhat ironically because of the actual issue at hand of us not being able to trust GitHub when we need to trust GitHub in order to get through our daily triage burdens, but in this circumstance, I wrote that I did not trust these.
So, I'm sorry for the confusion that it's causing, but it's really an indicator, showing that other people are experiencing frustration around the friction between they themselves realizing something is not working, and them resolving the issue after going through a potentially lengthy process to figure out that it actually is their source control and remote developer automation tooling that is failing them.
So I didn't put that conclusion in my comment.
When you two, in this thread, talk about humor on hacker News, I see where you're going. I really should have just put a conclusion in my comment so that it staved off the wandering to help make my comment more comprehensible, more quickly.
Sorry to have blown as much mental energy as it did, obviously resulting in an unwelcome and toxic result.
Thank you Tim, yes, merely sharing is what I was doing.
I didn't say, and I probably should have said, "Use the fact that there are a number of these developer focused IDE/ browser extension tools as motivating information, about the emerging need to support human developers in there daily triage burdens, as is it's arguably a need .. a trend that is worsening."
> why you'd share links to software you don't even recommend yourself?
Overall, I disagree and think it's valid and responsible to share links to apps if I disclaimed that I don't recommend installing their linked applications in an environment that has access to private data.
One valid reason, to share links, is to illustrate that there are more than zero efforts to address this issue - the parent comment issue - through and even more convenient practice than firing up a web browser, following link, waiting for it to load, reviewing the material, to see if GitHub status is red or green today. So this reason attempts to build up the importance of the parent comment's idea, and suggests that legitimate verifiable work is advisable, to continue down that path of making it more convenient for developers have simpler, more human indicators about the reliability of their digital tools.
I have tabs from like 6 months ago. Modern browsers have gotten pretty good at hibernating unused tabs and restore when needed. And this website is extremely light, it gets restored in milliseconds.
The browser history contains a lot of junk and I don't want that saved forever. Curated tab history is a bit different. It's stupid for sure, but also a bit comforting to keep the most important articles and such. For anything I really care about, there's always ArchiveBox.
Azure's going to suffocate github. I'm curious to see what's next. Will self-hosting the code repository come back in vogue or will another social-coding platform take off?
I used to work in a small independent team of 30 people within a large corp, half of which was dev. We used to run our own gitlab on-prem, our CI/CD was also on-prem. It worked perfectly, never had down time, devops guy could configure them on-demand to our needs. Me (and some other guys) also jumped in times to times to help (mostly just ssh into the servers for health check, disk partition, etc.). Then we grew (the biz team, dev was the same) and some new PMs with fancy Ivy League degrees came in and pushed for on-cloud Bitbucket. Things went to shit pretty fast after that ... Our codebase was only a few hundred thousands lines, there was only like hundreds of commits per day, the servers our git + CI/CD lived on never saturated ...
I've mostly worked for "engineering lead" corps and a PM has only ever affected outside software sold to users except for JIRA. There's no chance a PM would be able to affect the internal code storage/ci-cd systems at anywhere I've worked in the past unless they went on some proselytizing war path and convinced some senior lead engs to convince the rest of the org to accept it.
In the example, in my 20 year career, I've seen bitbucket in use once. I'm the one who usually manages that stuff since I'm an infra eng.
To be honest, I'm very much surprised Amazon hasn't eaten Microsoft's lunch here. Offer out-of-the-box AWS instances with Gitlab, SLAs, backups and the works, should be straightforward.
We should worry less about what everyone else uses, and more about what we use. I'm self-hosting Gitea and thinking of upgrading to Forgejo. What are you using?
If you move the company too, what would make you pay someone to run forgejo instead of self-hosting it? Disclosure, I run Fjord, a managed dedicated forgejo provider.
There was never a "sense of community", there was only low friction on issue reporting and especially, commenting on an issue you had nothing else to do with. Every time an issue hit HN it would be flooded with bystander comments.
If you're actively considering self hosting, I recommend giving forgejo a try. The experience is much more similar to what GitHub offers, actions API is nearly identical to name one similarity of which there are many. Moving essentially becomes one prompt and a coffee later for a small team.
I find this recommendation funny, because I completely agree from a sysadmin perspective.
I used to use Gitlab at work, and small teams would run into so many footguns with CI that we had to throw up guardrails to prevent mistakes. Far too many links to gitlab issues that were not fixed even after >8+ years of being open ended up biting us. With GHA I haven't had that experience, and same for all of my self hosted Forgejo instances. I used to hate using GHA from about ~2018 to 2021, but they've fixed a lot of things I disliked since then.
What do you need real anchors for? Sharing of pipelines?
Maybe I’ve been burned too much by pipeline maintenance (because we didn’t have yaml anchors?) but I rather have builds defined in make /bazel/etc than in yaml. So the only thing the pipeline does is optionally restoring caches, kicking off the build system, uploading PR validation results, and saving cache. Pushing artifact etc is all done from inside the build system.
There is no “setup” like installing packages because we make the build image seperately.
probably not. The people that have done it before or willing to do it now is probably a very % of the commit volume, they leaving wouldn't change much, probably not gonna even move the exponential growth needle.
I've heard that companies that run enterprise Github instances on-premises have almost equally poor availability compared to github.com. There are probably plenty of reasons why they have so many outages, though I agree one of them is probably Azure. The outages started around the same time as the number of pushed commits skyrocketed, and the number of Dependabot vulnerabilities started growing as well, which in its turn increases the amount of PRs and Actions activity. Also, LLMs regularly import dependencies that are already out of date, meaning that when doing agentic development, one commit often results in several Dependabot PRs being created instantly.
> Probably just a coincidence that Github started to have issues after beginning their move to Azure at the end of last year.
Right.
I'd like to think that Azure has improved in a meaningful way in the past half a decade or so... but it has not. Maybe less inexplicable 400 errors in random API calls, I guess.
And yet Microsoft keeps posting record growth. Unbelievable.
I'm told that GitHub has asserted to us that moving to this model means we would not be exposed to github.com outages. It's not at feature parity with github.com though.
We're currently on "GitHub Enterprise Cloud" on github.com and are affected by this outage (even though we use self-hosted runners!), but we're not on "GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency" on *.ghe.com, which I understand is/may not be affected by this outage?
This is what they've told us. It's represented as basically a separate deployment of the entire GHEC stack, so you're not exposed to the load/scaling issues they believe are the underlying cause of all the github.com outages today.
Meaningful is subjective, but yes I do. It was very stable for many years, and I do believe the recent issues are mostly or all because they were caught flat-footed by the rapid AI-driven load increases.
This has been a bad time, though. I'm ready to move back to self-hosting if they can't get it together or we move to GHDR and it's still bad.
A lot of the stability problems come from trying to scale a free product on a still WIP cloud solution without costing too much; the same software running on separate, paid for infra has a lot better odds.
“GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency” is hosted on separate infrastructure and dedicated subdomains under *.ghe.com. It’s been around since November 2024z
It’s not the same thing as GitHub Enterprise Cloud hosted on the shared global network on github.com.
So confusing and so Microsoft. They love to have licensing so complicated their own sales people aren't up to date and have to rely on third party spreadsheets.
Edit:
Read that document - why do more people not do the self hosted option with GitHub Enterprise Server ?
At the point you are self hosting, you have many more options ranging from a simple ssh git server with pick your favorite cicd, to gitlab ce, to forgejo, and more.
Just to be clear, I am on Github Enterprise, and am also experiencing this disruption both privately and publicly on every org and project I have access to.
That's what I don't understand. They could mitigate their name so much if they just split free/paid/enterprise. It's already shown that enterprise is much more estable and is largely unaffected from service disruptions. Why don't they go one more layer? For sure it's worth the extra complexity.
There is no such thing as "just split" there is 20+ years of legacy decisions and even if the split is relatively clean it is still probably 1 years work for 200 people for maybe a marginal improvement.
The real money is going to go towards, "make this all more reliable".
Depending on the cause of the current issues, that move would likely cause more harm to paid services than good.
Their last postmortem made clear that their challenges are operational. Scale puts pressure on operation, but it's not what blocks them from keeping up.
Doubling the operation doubles the operational challenges.
It would probably be better to run projects with extremely high commit/merge frequency on a separate "slop infrastructure", basically like MMOs move cheaters to their own servers ;)
Things can go wrong, but really, its been a lot and we're normalizing that to an unhealthy degree...
I wonder if it was down that much, if users would get credits the way we pay when we use the services - its kind of ridiculous for a critical service to be down that much and all we do is "ah okay, its just github". Like, as if that was normal to be down that much...
At the time, most email was either local to the host (big mainframe in the basement) or transferred once a day through scheduled dial-up connections during off-peak phone hours
I saw an application once about 25 years ago that was built on SMTP for communication. I think it was an inter library loan system, but can't remember for sure. I was a pretty smart way of not having to worry much about redundancy in the communications.
I don't think it's been "normalized". Github uptime is literally a joke in the tech community. They have first mover advantage and a behemoth behind them so they're not going away, but everyone knows how shit it's uptime is. It takes time for organizations to move away from services like this but I would bet anything that many are starting to try to move away, as well as new companies knowing they shouldn't use the service.
>Update - primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues
And now they're blaming their upstream vendor! Embarrassing stuff to be writing on a public page.
Vitess is a distributed mysql database. Github could very well be managing it entirely on their own. I have only seen people managing their own vitess, its entirely open source afaik.
> Update - primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues
I spent a bunch of time during the outage last week setting up forgejo and some custom action runners. At the time, I was worried I was wasting time and getting distracted from my real work...alas, I guess not. Gonna finish up that work and complete the move today.
If the problem is scalability, just rate limit git commands on free accounts already. Nobody realistically need to push multiple times per minute, and that alone is bound to trickle down to anything that triggers on commits and pushes.
My point is: they blame it on scale. If that's the story they want us to believe, then they have to explain WHY such a simple fix isn't possible.
There may be non technical reasons for it, even: legal, or PR, but if they want me to believe the "scalability excuse" they need to convince me they're trying.
I don’t know, but typically when orgs don’t make logical decisions, it’s because internal politics are incentivizing something else.
I suspect that rate-limits would fly in the face of a lot of narratives like “Azure is ready for hyperscale”. And getting eyes on Github is probably a part of their Copilot product strategy.
> We've identified an issue with a database primary and are failing over to a replica immediately
This is why it's hard to take GitHub seriously. How can a single database cause an outage for everyone? This is amateur stuff. Have they no sharding or partitioning internally? Paying customers should not be impacted in the same way as free ones are.
> primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues
RDBMS replication and failover is way more difficult and manual than anyone would like. You can't just set up two postgres, tell them they're clustered and have it basically work; at a minimum you have to design the client to somehow know which one is currently the master, or use some sort of proxy (which becomes its own SPOF).
RDBMS integrity basically requires that one master server is responsible for the whole data set and other servers may replicate from it. And it usually doesn't wait for a quorum of replicas, just for one, because the design is to recover from a hardware failure, not a network partition, although that could be fixed at the cost of increased latency.
This can be implemented in front of any RDBMS as a separate layer. Traditionally they weren't designed for quorum-sensing since it hadn't been invented yet. I'd be surprised if something like pgbouncer couldn't do it.
Did you not read it? Just because there's a database primary doesn't mean there is 1 primary database. There's likely man redundancies and they have issue with how they're allocating traffic to them which is in turn causing an issue with how much traffic redundancies are receiving.
Either 1) infrastructure for paying and non paying customers must be separated, 2) excessive load must be ended by not offering the free tier anymore or 3) they must fix their broken monolith but they are seemingly incapable of doing so.
It very well may be that the paying customers are actually the problem. Those can actually afford to throw enough money at AI providers to significantly increase the number of commits & other actions.
Notice odd behavior on GitHub. Get gaslit by a green status page. Notice more odd behavior on GitHub. Think it must be me this time. See unusual action queuing. Ah, an incident on the status page. Go for a walk and check HN on my phone. The AI SDLC.
Good. Now everyone is getting to see what over-investment in complexity nets you. This bad of reliability screams "tangled spaghetti shit show" behind the scenes.
It's a shame that this is happening and hopefully Microsoft do the right thing and spin it back off into a private entity with its own leadership and resources.
Also, self-serving: this is why the whole "big company means better" thing is bs. We need to aggressively go back to a culture that rewards and supports independent teams who actually give a damn about what they're building and responsible for. Otherwise, this is just a preview of everything everywhere in a few years.
I started the campaign to move us from Bitbucket to Github before the Microsoft acquisition. If I knew MS would be involved, I'd have campaigned for something else. I would never recommend any Microsoft product.
It took ages for us to get permission and licenses. We only recently finished moving the last repos over and shut down Bitbucket.
If AWS offered a product like GH, I could probably unilaterally start moving to that. Any other alternative would take 3-4 years of meetings, budgets, lawyers, and other such nonsense before we could declare we'd left Github.
This level of scale is extreme but it can be handled with proper time investment and careful engineering.
But that doesn't fit into the "spend gobs of money as fast as possible so you can be a hypothetical feudal lord in a sci-fi dystopia novel you read when you were twelve" line of thinking.
I have been very happy with github for _years_. Lately, not so much. Now I want to try a self-hosting alternative again. I tried gitlab years ago (pre-pandemic, IIRC), and it wasn't for me (they had _serious_ security issues as well, which of course didn't affect my self-hosting thing, but still...).
So - where do we stand in August 2026?
*EDIT:* No, I don't want anything related to Felon Musk.
Another outage, this time with GitHub Actions. Last time that happened was 5 days ago [0] and another outage happened on the postmortem announcement as well. [1]
While GitHub is imploding itself, maybe you should think about self-hosting.
