I don't want to give too much credit to Github, because their uptime is truly horrendous and they need to fix it. But: I've felt like its a little unfair to judge the uptime of company platforms like this; by saying "if any feature at all is down, its all down" and then translating that into 9s for the platform.
I never use Github Copilot; it does go down a lot, if their status page is to be believed; I don't really care when it goes down, because it going down doesn't bring down the rest of Github. I care about Github's uptime ignoring Copilot. Everyone's slice of what they care about is a little different, so the only correct way to speak on Github's uptime is to be precise and probably focus on a lot of the core stuff that tons of people care about and that's been struggling lately: Core git operations, website functionality, api access, actions, etc.
> I've felt like its a little unfair to judge the uptime of company platforms like this; by saying "if any feature at all is down, its all down" and then translating that into 9s for the platform.
This is definitely true.
At the same time, none of the individual services has hit 3x9 uptime in the last 90 days [0], which is their Enterprise SLA ...
> GitHub commits to maintain at least 99.9% Uptime for the applicable GitHub service. [1]
You're right that labelling any outage as "Github is down" is an overgeneralisation, & we should focus on bottlenecks that impact teams in a time sensitive matter, but that isn't the case here. Their most stable service (API) has only two 9s (99.69%).
They're not even struggling to get their average to three 9s, they're struggling to get ANY service to that level.
Copilot may be the least stable at one 9, but the services I would consider most critical (Git & Actions) are also at one 9.
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.
You can pin actions versions to their hash. Some might say this is a best practice for now. It looks like this, where the comment says where the hash is supposed to point.
Old --> uses: actions/checkout@v4
New --> uses: actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683 # v4
The problem is actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683 probably doesn’t do this same pinning, and the actions ecosystem is such an intertwined mess that any single compromised action can propagate to the rest
This is true specifically for actions/checkout, but composite actions can have other actions as dependencies, and unless the composite action pins the versions of its dependencies, it is vulnerable for this attack.
This article[0] gives a good overview of the challenges, and also has a link to a concrete attack where this was exploited.
I've always been worried about their backend changing and somehow named tags with a previous commit hash working for an attacker to give something you didn't expect for the commit hash.
See also pinact[1], gha-update[2], and zizmor's unpinned-uses[3].
The main desiderata with these kinds of action pinning tools is that they (1) leave a tag comment, (2) leave that comment in a format that Dependabot and/or Renovate understands for bumping purposes, and (3) actually put the full tag in the comment, rather than the cutesy short tag that GitHub encourages people to make mutable (v4.x.y instead of v4).
I worry that CI just got overcomplicated by default when providers started rocking up with templated YAML and various abstractions over it to add dynamic behaviour, dependencies, and so on.
Perhaps mixing the CI with the CD made that worse because usually deployment and delivery has complexities of its own. Back in the day you'd probably use Jenkins for the delivery piece, and the E2E nightlies, and use something more lightweight for running your tests and linters.
For that part I feel like all you need, really, is to be able to run a suite of well structured shell scripts. Maybe if you're in git you follow its hooks convention to execute scripts in a directory named after the repo event or something. Forget about creating reusable 'actions' which depend on running untrusted code.
Provide some baked in utilities to help with reporting status, caching, saving junit files and what have you.
The only thing that remains is setting up a base image with all your tooling in it. Docker does that, and is probably the only bit where you'd have to accept relying on untrusted third parties, unless you can scan them and store your own cached version of it.
I make it sound simpler than it is but for some reason we accepted distributed YAML-based balls of mud for the system that is critical to deploying our code, that has unsupervised access to almost everything. And people are now hooking AI agents into it.
You could use these shell script versions of pipelines in GHA though, right? There is nothing stopping you from triggering a bash script via a "run" step in YAML.
These reusable actions are nothing but a convenience feature. This discussion isn't much different than any other supply chain, dependency, or packaging system vulnerability such as NPM, etc.
One slight disclaimer here is the ability of someone to run their own updated copy of an action when making a PR. Which could be used to exfil secrets. This one is NOT related to being dependent on unverified actions though.
(re-reading this came across as more harsh than I intended.. my bad on that. But am I missing something or is this the same issue that every open-source user-submitted package repository runs in to?)
I'm trying out SelfCI [1] for one of my projects and it's similar to what you were describing. My whole CI pipeline is just a shell script that runs the actual build and test commands, I can write a script in another language like python if I need more complexity and I can run it all locally at any time to debug.
It really feels like Firefox is not a supported browser on GitHub, I hit this and also find that much of the time the commit message is not correctly pulled from the PR description when that setting is enabled
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.
I work on lots of smaller client projects - usually named by the hostname. I absolutely don't understand how at some point the github search got so great it became unable to find my own repo by its name.
We have since switched to self hosted Forgejo instance. Unsurprisingly the search works.
This was before Actions and a whole lot of other non-git related stuff. There was years (maybe even a decade?) where GitHub essentially was unchanged besides fixes and small incremental improvements, long time ago :)
> The improvements to PR review have been nice though
I dunno, probably the worst UX downgrade so far, almost no PRs are "fully available" on page load, but requires additional clicks and scrolling to "unlock" all the context, kind of sucks.
Used to be you loaded the PR diff and you actually saw the full diff, except really large files. You could do CTRL+F and search for stuff, you didn't need to click to expand even small files. Reviewing medium/large PRs is just borderline obnoxious today on GH.
I find it impossible to use the current diff view for most codebases, and spend tons of time clicking open all available sections...
They have somehow found the worst possible amount of context for doing review. I tend to pull everything down to VS Code if I want to have any confidence these days.
They definitely have. Github evolved a lot faster after the microsoft acquisition, I remember being mildly impressed after it was stagnant for years (this is not an opinion on whether it was evolving in the right direction or if it was a good trade-off)
> I wish we could get back to platforms (or OSes for that matter) focusing in reliability and stability
That's only a valid sentiment if you only use the big players. Both of those have medium/smaller competitors that have shown (for decades) that they are extremely boring, therefore stable.
Try convincing the CTO that this panoply of smaller players will be around for 5yrs or worth the effort migrating to.
I'm at a much smaller outfit now so we have more freedom but I'd dread to think the arguments I would've had at the 4000+ employee companies I was at before.
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.
And notably, that page makes this post's title inaccurate. As of this morning, it says `90.21% uptime`, which is a _single_ 9, not 3 (though that's for the platform as a whole, no individual component appears to achieve three 9s.)
At that 3rd party side GH is currently noticeable worse then claude ...
Like they are down to one 9 availability and very very close to losing that to (90.2x%).
This also fit more closely to my personal experience, then the 99.900-99.989 range the article indicates...
Through honestly 99.9% means 8.76h downtime a year, if we say no more then 20min down time per 3 hours (sliding window), and no more then 1h a day, and >50% downtime being (localized) off-working hours (e.g. night, Sat,Sun) then 99.9% is something you can work with. Sure it would sometimes be slightly annoying. But should not cause any real issues.
On the other hand 90.21%... That is 35.73h outage a year. Probably still fine if for each location the working hour availability is 99.95% and the previous constraints are there. But uh, wtf. that just isn't right for a company of that size.
This is ... surprisingly honest? The one above is "missing" status page; and most status pages would legally have to be filed in the "fiction" section of the library.
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.
That’s… one 9 of reliability. You could argue the title understates the problem.
> You don't need every single service to be online in order to use GitHub.
Well that’s how they want you to use it, so it’s an epic failure in their intended use story. Another way to put this is ”if you use more GitHub features, your overall reliability goes down significantly and unpredictably”.
Look, I have never been obsessed with nines for most types of services. But the cloud service providers certainly were using it as major selling/bragging points until it got boring and old because of LLMs. Same with security. And GitHub is so upstream that downstream effects can propagate and cascade quite seriously.
On the other hand: it also doesn't include instances where GitHub is painfully slow but technically usable.
These days it is very common that something like opening the diff view of a trivial PR takes 15-30 seconds to load. Sure, it will eventually load after a long wait or an F5, but it is still negatively impacting my productivity.
Windows (including Notepad and Explorer), too. I think ~Office~ ~Office 365~ ~Microsoft 365~ Copilot 365 is still technically useful despite the insane branding and licensing and AI slop features, but I doubt it'll last much longer.
IPv6 ignorance is the canary. There's plenty of architecture ignorance below the surface. The real question is why aren't they failing annual security audits?
I only use GitHub (and actions) for personal open-source projects, so I can't really complain because I'm getting everything for free¹. But even for those projects I recently had to (partially) switch actions to a paid solution² because GitHub's runners were randomly getting stuck for no discernible reason.
I have a little bit of sympathy for Github because if everyone is like me then they are getting 5-6x the demand they were last year just based on sheer commits alone, not to mention Github Copilot usage.
The availability expectations gap is interesting
from an education standpoint. Students are tought
that 99.9% sounds impressive without contextualizing
what that means in practice — roughly 8 hours of
downtime per year. For a platform that millions
of developers depend on as critical infrastructure
during work hours, that math hits very differently
than it does for a consumer app.
wait they still have 3 ninth, it really doesn't feel like that
but then their status center isn't really trust-able anymore and
a lot of temporary issues I have been running into seem to be temporary,
partial, localized failures which sometimes fall under temp. slow to a
point of usability. Temporary served outdated (by >30min) main/head. etc.
For solo and small team projects, I've started treating GitHub as distribution rather than infrastructure. Git itself is distributed — the repo on my machine is the source of truth. Deploy scripts that can run without GitHub Actions. Local backups of anything critical.
It's a bit more work upfront, but the peace of mind when you see yet another incident on the status page is worth it.
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.
Sure they can. Perhaps a useful example of something like this would be to consider cryptography. Crypto is ridiculously complex and difficult to do correctly. Most individual developers have no hope of producing good cryptographic code on the same scale and dependability of the big crypto libraries and organizations. At the same time these central libraries and organizations have bugs, mistakes and weaknesses that can and do cause big problems for people. None of that changes the fact that for most developers “rolling your own crypto” is a bad idea.
That’s an excellent example. OpenSSL, by virtue of trying to do everything is the most buggy implementation of TLS generally available today leading to the point where there have been hard forks designed to reduce the scope to limit this damage.
I’d go so far as to say that there are more crypto libraries than there are “default” options for SaaS Git VCS (Gitlab and Github are the mainstay in companies and maybe Azure Devops if you hate your staff- nobody sensible is using bitbucket) but for TLS implementations there’s RustTLS, GnuTLS, BoringSSL, LibreSSL, WolfSSL, NSS, and AWS-LC that come to mind immediately.
I worked on the react team while at GitHub and you could easily tell which pages rendered with react vs which were still using turbo. I wish we took perf more seriously as a culture there
I'm somewhat surprised with Github's strategy in the AI times.
I understand how appealing it is to build an AI coding agent and all that, but shouldn't they - above everything else - make sure they remain THE platform for code distribution, collaboration and alike? And it doesnt need to be humans, that can be agents as well.
They should serve the AI agent world first and foremost. Cause if they dont pull that off, and dont pull off building one of the best coding agents - whcih so far they didnt - there isn't much left.
There's so many new features needed in this new world. Really unclear why we hear so little about it, while maintainers smack the alarm bell that they're drowning in slop.
Microsoft’s real goal is selling Copilot seats and pushing Azure, not building a neutral playground for third-party agents. There is just no money for them in being the backend for someone else's AI.
As for the AI spam, GitHub's internal metrics have always been tied to engagement and PR volume. Blocking all that AI slop would instantly drop their growth numbers, so it is easier for them to just pass the cleanup cost onto open-source maintainers.
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.
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).
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.
why is az devops on the floor? i am having to choose between the clients existing az dops and our internal gitlab for where to host a pipeline, and i don't know what would be good at all
It works fine,it just feels like it has been under a kind of maintenance mode for a while.
There's clearly one small team that works on it. There are pros and cons to that.
It hasn't even got an obnoxious Copilot button yet for example, but on the other hand it was only relatively recently you could properly edit comments in markdown.
If the client has existing AzDo Pipelines then I'd suggest keeping them there.
This was after seeing those ridiculous PRs where microsoft engineers patiently deconstructed AI slop PRs they were forced to deal with on the open source repos they maintained.
When he was gone a few months later and github was folded into microsoft's org chart the writing was firmly on the wall.
He was never truly independent though. The org structure was such that the GitHub CEO reported up through a Microsoft VP and Satya. He was never really a CEO after the acquisition, it was in name only.
Also of note is that the Microsoft org chart always showed GitHub in that structure while the org chart available to GitHub stopped at their CEO. Its not that they were finally rolled into Microsoft's org chart so much as they lifted the veil and stopped pretending.
I never said he was "truly independent" nor meant to imply it.
Nonetheless it looks like he was both willing and able to push back on a good deal of the AI stupidity raining down from above and then he was removed and then, well, this...
ITT lots of complaining, not much building. Microsoft does not give a fuck what you think - they only care if the revenue line goes up. And the revenue line keeps going up despite this instability. Want to build the next unicorn? Build a GitHub competitor.
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
Think the world would be a better place if 70-80% uptime were more tolerated. We really don’t need everything available all the time. More time to talk to each other, to think, more “slow time”.
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
It always starts out good enough, but the reason they pursue horizontal integration is that it ensures that you won't be able to get out even if (when) you eventually want to. You'll be as glued as a fly to flypaper.
That's the reason you hear the complaints: they're from people who no longer want to be using this product but have no choice.
Because Microsoft doesn't need to innovate or even provide good service to keep the flies glued, they do what they've been doing: focus all their resources on making the glue stickier rather than focusing on making people want to stay even if they had an option to leave.
We use GH and are investing more in the platform features.
Codespaces specifically is quite good for agent heavy teams. Launch a full stack runtime for PRs that are agent owned.
> keep hearing that Github is terrible
I do not doubt people are having issues and I'm sure there have been outages and problems, but none that have affected my work for weeks.
GH is many things to many teams and my sense is that some parts of it are currently less stable than others. But the overall package is still quite good and delivers a lot of value, IMO.
There is a bit of an echo chamber effect with GH to some degree.
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.
We've jumped ship to self-hosted Jenkins. Woodpecker CI looks cool but Jenkins seemed like a safer bet for us. It's been well worth the effort and it's simplified and sped up our CI massively.
Once we got the email that they were going to charge for self-hosted runners that was the final nail in the coffin for us. They walked it back but we've lost faith entirely in the platform and vision.
"Agreed on the echo chamber point. For solo indie projects the overhead of GH Actions adds up though — I moved to self-hosted deploys and cut the complexity significantly. Different tradeoffs for teams vs solo."
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.
Anyone who used the phrase "measly" in relation to three nines is inadvertently admitting their lack of knowledge in massive systems. 99.9 and 99.95 is the target for some of the most common systems you use all day and is by no means easy to achieve. Even just relying on a couple regional AWS services will put your CEILING at three nines. It's even more embarrassing when people post that one GH uptime tracker that combines many services into 1 single number as if that means anything useful.
Three 9s is a perfectly reasonable bar to expect for services you depend on. Without GitHub my company cannot deploy code. There is no alternative method to patch prod. In addition many development activities are halted, wasting labor costs.
We wouldn’t couple so much if we knew reliability would be this low. It will influence future decisions.
I don't want to give too much credit to Github, because their uptime is truly horrendous and they need to fix it. But: I've felt like its a little unfair to judge the uptime of company platforms like this; by saying "if any feature at all is down, its all down" and then translating that into 9s for the platform.
I never use Github Copilot; it does go down a lot, if their status page is to be believed; I don't really care when it goes down, because it going down doesn't bring down the rest of Github. I care about Github's uptime ignoring Copilot. Everyone's slice of what they care about is a little different, so the only correct way to speak on Github's uptime is to be precise and probably focus on a lot of the core stuff that tons of people care about and that's been struggling lately: Core git operations, website functionality, api access, actions, etc.
> I've felt like its a little unfair to judge the uptime of company platforms like this; by saying "if any feature at all is down, its all down" and then translating that into 9s for the platform.
This is definitely true.
At the same time, none of the individual services has hit 3x9 uptime in the last 90 days [0], which is their Enterprise SLA ...
> GitHub commits to maintain at least 99.9% Uptime for the applicable GitHub service. [1]
[0]: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
[1]: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
You're right that labelling any outage as "Github is down" is an overgeneralisation, & we should focus on bottlenecks that impact teams in a time sensitive matter, but that isn't the case here. Their most stable service (API) has only two 9s (99.69%).
They're not even struggling to get their average to three 9s, they're struggling to get ANY service to that level.
Copilot may be the least stable at one 9, but the services I would consider most critical (Git & Actions) are also at one 9.
I love multiple 9s as much as the next guy but that's only 27 hours per year of downtime. For a mostly free (for me) service, I'm thankful.
ONLY TWO NINES! Meanwhile vital government services here have a whopping 25% availability.
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.
Public service announcement
You can pin actions versions to their hash. Some might say this is a best practice for now. It looks like this, where the comment says where the hash is supposed to point.
There is a tool to sweep through your repo and automate this: https://github.com/mheap/pin-github-actionThe problem is actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683 probably doesn’t do this same pinning, and the actions ecosystem is such an intertwined mess that any single compromised action can propagate to the rest
Yes, true, but at least the fire won't spread through this one point. Hopefully all of your upstreams can be persuaded to pin also.
Well, it is a git commit hash of the action repo that contains the transpiled/bundled javascript.
Like: https://github.com/actions/checkout/tree/11bd71901bbe5b1630c...
So I'm pretty sure that for the same commit hash, I'll be executing the same content.
This is true specifically for actions/checkout, but composite actions can have other actions as dependencies, and unless the composite action pins the versions of its dependencies, it is vulnerable for this attack.
This article[0] gives a good overview of the challenges, and also has a link to a concrete attack where this was exploited.
[0]: https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/github-actions-package-manager...
My preferred tool to solve these issues is called 'gitlab'
CircleCI
TravisCI
Jenkins
scripts dir
Etc
I've always been worried about their backend changing and somehow named tags with a previous commit hash working for an attacker to give something you didn't expect for the commit hash.
See also pinact[1], gha-update[2], and zizmor's unpinned-uses[3].
The main desiderata with these kinds of action pinning tools is that they (1) leave a tag comment, (2) leave that comment in a format that Dependabot and/or Renovate understands for bumping purposes, and (3) actually put the full tag in the comment, rather than the cutesy short tag that GitHub encourages people to make mutable (v4.x.y instead of v4).
[1]: https://github.com/suzuki-shunsuke/pinact
[2]: https://github.com/davidism/gha-update
[3]: https://docs.zizmor.sh/audits/#unpinned-uses
I worry that CI just got overcomplicated by default when providers started rocking up with templated YAML and various abstractions over it to add dynamic behaviour, dependencies, and so on.
Perhaps mixing the CI with the CD made that worse because usually deployment and delivery has complexities of its own. Back in the day you'd probably use Jenkins for the delivery piece, and the E2E nightlies, and use something more lightweight for running your tests and linters.
For that part I feel like all you need, really, is to be able to run a suite of well structured shell scripts. Maybe if you're in git you follow its hooks convention to execute scripts in a directory named after the repo event or something. Forget about creating reusable 'actions' which depend on running untrusted code.
Provide some baked in utilities to help with reporting status, caching, saving junit files and what have you.
The only thing that remains is setting up a base image with all your tooling in it. Docker does that, and is probably the only bit where you'd have to accept relying on untrusted third parties, unless you can scan them and store your own cached version of it.
I make it sound simpler than it is but for some reason we accepted distributed YAML-based balls of mud for the system that is critical to deploying our code, that has unsupervised access to almost everything. And people are now hooking AI agents into it.
You could use these shell script versions of pipelines in GHA though, right? There is nothing stopping you from triggering a bash script via a "run" step in YAML.
These reusable actions are nothing but a convenience feature. This discussion isn't much different than any other supply chain, dependency, or packaging system vulnerability such as NPM, etc.
One slight disclaimer here is the ability of someone to run their own updated copy of an action when making a PR. Which could be used to exfil secrets. This one is NOT related to being dependent on unverified actions though.
(re-reading this came across as more harsh than I intended.. my bad on that. But am I missing something or is this the same issue that every open-source user-submitted package repository runs in to?)
I'm trying out SelfCI [1] for one of my projects and it's similar to what you were describing. My whole CI pipeline is just a shell script that runs the actual build and test commands, I can write a script in another language like python if I need more complexity and I can run it all locally at any time to debug.
[1] https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad%3Az2tDzYbAX...
> GHA can’t even be called Swiss cheese anymore, it’s so much worse than that.
That's a high bar though. Few things are better than Swiss cheese.
If you want more ammo for your ranting (no offense meant, I also rant): an issue as massive as https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/142308 lingering for years should do the trick.
It really feels like Firefox is not a supported browser on GitHub, I hit this and also find that much of the time the commit message is not correctly pulled from the PR description when that setting is enabled
Meanwhile, bitbucket has never given us problems with several of our team using Firefox
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.
GitHub have not really got much better at adding new features either though :(
I don't know, it's nice that they finally broke native browser in-page search. That's a great feature for people who hate finding things.
I work on lots of smaller client projects - usually named by the hostname. I absolutely don't understand how at some point the github search got so great it became unable to find my own repo by its name.
We have since switched to self hosted Forgejo instance. Unsurprisingly the search works.
Makes you actually read the code!
Intended usage is to use Edge Copilot to search the page for you.
This was before Actions and a whole lot of other non-git related stuff. There was years (maybe even a decade?) where GitHub essentially was unchanged besides fixes and small incremental improvements, long time ago :)
Back in the day when software could be "finished". Ahh, the good 'ol days
GH Actions was good for them as another billable feature, but I'm skeptical we actually gained much over external CI providers
The improvements to PR review have been nice though
> The improvements to PR review have been nice though
I dunno, probably the worst UX downgrade so far, almost no PRs are "fully available" on page load, but requires additional clicks and scrolling to "unlock" all the context, kind of sucks.
Used to be you loaded the PR diff and you actually saw the full diff, except really large files. You could do CTRL+F and search for stuff, you didn't need to click to expand even small files. Reviewing medium/large PRs is just borderline obnoxious today on GH.
I find it impossible to use the current diff view for most codebases, and spend tons of time clicking open all available sections...
They have somehow found the worst possible amount of context for doing review. I tend to pull everything down to VS Code if I want to have any confidence these days.
Don't forget the security implications if you host your own actions runner.
They definitely have. Github evolved a lot faster after the microsoft acquisition, I remember being mildly impressed after it was stagnant for years (this is not an opinion on whether it was evolving in the right direction or if it was a good trade-off)
No they were slow at doing features before, and they are still slow afterwards.
They added the service unavailable feature.
> I wish we could get back to platforms (or OSes for that matter) focusing in reliability and stability
That's only a valid sentiment if you only use the big players. Both of those have medium/smaller competitors that have shown (for decades) that they are extremely boring, therefore stable.
Try convincing the CTO that this panoply of smaller players will be around for 5yrs or worth the effort migrating to.
I'm at a much smaller outfit now so we have more freedom but I'd dread to think the arguments I would've had at the 4000+ employee companies I was at before.
I think stability and reliability have vastly improved over the last years in general (not necessarily talking about gh specifically)
It's just that everybody is using 100 tools and dependencies which themselves depend on 50 others to be working.
Perhaps when they switch over fully to Azure they'll forget to disable IPv6 access. One can dream
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
Especially compared to its archive page: https://web.archive.org/web/20190510070456/https://www.githu...
1-4 incidents per month compared to about 1 daily.
And notably, that page makes this post's title inaccurate. As of this morning, it says `90.21% uptime`, which is a _single_ 9, not 3 (though that's for the platform as a whole, no individual component appears to achieve three 9s.)
Note that it gets 90% largely off Copilot going down and Actions not working. Actual git has 98.98%, which is still just one 9 but a lot better.
> 98.98%
it's the 2 nines they aimed for
It looks this bad because that includes 'degraded performance,' not just outrage.
freudian slip
Well then clearly you haven't taken a look at https://status.claude.com.
At that 3rd party side GH is currently noticeable worse then claude ...
Like they are down to one 9 availability and very very close to losing that to (90.2x%).
This also fit more closely to my personal experience, then the 99.900-99.989 range the article indicates...
Through honestly 99.9% means 8.76h downtime a year, if we say no more then 20min down time per 3 hours (sliding window), and no more then 1h a day, and >50% downtime being (localized) off-working hours (e.g. night, Sat,Sun) then 99.9% is something you can work with. Sure it would sometimes be slightly annoying. But should not cause any real issues.
On the other hand 90.21%... That is 35.73h outage a year. Probably still fine if for each location the working hour availability is 99.95% and the previous constraints are there. But uh, wtf. that just isn't right for a company of that size.
You may have fumbled the calculator at one point. 20Min per 3 hours is 88.8% uptime. 99.9% uptime is 11 seconds down.
This is ... surprisingly honest? The one above is "missing" status page; and most status pages would legally have to be filed in the "fiction" section of the library.
I get the email notifications from Anthropic’s status monitor, and I think they might be my most frequent emailer these days.
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.
> Copilot [has] seen a 96.47% uptime
That’s… one 9 of reliability. You could argue the title understates the problem.
> You don't need every single service to be online in order to use GitHub.
Well that’s how they want you to use it, so it’s an epic failure in their intended use story. Another way to put this is ”if you use more GitHub features, your overall reliability goes down significantly and unpredictably”.
Look, I have never been obsessed with nines for most types of services. But the cloud service providers certainly were using it as major selling/bragging points until it got boring and old because of LLMs. Same with security. And GitHub is so upstream that downstream effects can propagate and cascade quite seriously.
Here is the same thing in 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190510070456/https://www.githu...
It seems that the same metric is about a magnitude worse than before.
On the other hand: it also doesn't include instances where GitHub is painfully slow but technically usable.
These days it is very common that something like opening the diff view of a trivial PR takes 15-30 seconds to load. Sure, it will eventually load after a long wait or an F5, but it is still negatively impacting my productivity.
the basic git services are at one nine of availability
more context -- their enterprise SLA is 99.9% (3x9) uptime for individual services
https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
> GitHub commits to maintain at least 99.9% Uptime for the applicable GitHub service.
... and none of the individual services have hit 99.9% uptime in the last 90 days according to this site. 0_o
96% is horrible uptime though
Nothing unexpected. Microsoft has a remarkable talent for turning good products into useless ones. Skype is another good showcase of such talent.
When will they introduce GitHub for Business?
My company is on GitHub Enterprise.
Windows (including Notepad and Explorer), too. I think ~Office~ ~Office 365~ ~Microsoft 365~ Copilot 365 is still technically useful despite the insane branding and licensing and AI slop features, but I doubt it'll last much longer.
IPv6 ignorance is the canary. There's plenty of architecture ignorance below the surface. The real question is why aren't they failing annual security audits?
https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/organizat...
Coz the audits have same quality as architecture lmfao
I only use GitHub (and actions) for personal open-source projects, so I can't really complain because I'm getting everything for free¹. But even for those projects I recently had to (partially) switch actions to a paid solution² because GitHub's runners were randomly getting stuck for no discernible reason.
¹ Glossing over the "what they're getting in return" part. ² https://www.warpbuild.com/
I have a little bit of sympathy for Github because if everyone is like me then they are getting 5-6x the demand they were last year just based on sheer commits alone, not to mention Github Copilot usage.
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ Even ignoring Copilot, they seem to be barely at 2 nines of uptime for any service component.
The availability expectations gap is interesting from an education standpoint. Students are tought that 99.9% sounds impressive without contextualizing what that means in practice — roughly 8 hours of downtime per year. For a platform that millions of developers depend on as critical infrastructure during work hours, that math hits very differently than it does for a consumer app.
wait they still have 3 ninth, it really doesn't feel like that
but then their status center isn't really trust-able anymore and a lot of temporary issues I have been running into seem to be temporary, partial, localized failures which sometimes fall under temp. slow to a point of usability. Temporary served outdated (by >30min) main/head. etc.
so that won't even show up in this statistics
For solo and small team projects, I've started treating GitHub as distribution rather than infrastructure. Git itself is distributed — the repo on my machine is the source of truth. Deploy scripts that can run without GitHub Actions. Local backups of anything critical. It's a bit more work upfront, but the peace of mind when you see yet another incident on the status page is worth it.
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...
> These two things can’t be true simultaneously
Sure they can. Perhaps a useful example of something like this would be to consider cryptography. Crypto is ridiculously complex and difficult to do correctly. Most individual developers have no hope of producing good cryptographic code on the same scale and dependability of the big crypto libraries and organizations. At the same time these central libraries and organizations have bugs, mistakes and weaknesses that can and do cause big problems for people. None of that changes the fact that for most developers “rolling your own crypto” is a bad idea.
That’s an excellent example. OpenSSL, by virtue of trying to do everything is the most buggy implementation of TLS generally available today leading to the point where there have been hard forks designed to reduce the scope to limit this damage.
I’d go so far as to say that there are more crypto libraries than there are “default” options for SaaS Git VCS (Gitlab and Github are the mainstay in companies and maybe Azure Devops if you hate your staff- nobody sensible is using bitbucket) but for TLS implementations there’s RustTLS, GnuTLS, BoringSSL, LibreSSL, WolfSSL, NSS, and AWS-LC that come to mind immediately.
Pretty soon, the only 9 they’re going to have is the 9 8s…
“Microsoft Tentacle” - Now there’s a name for a new product line.
this comment reminded me that GitKraken was a thing. And still is, apparently
I worked on the react team while at GitHub and you could easily tell which pages rendered with react vs which were still using turbo. I wish we took perf more seriously as a culture there
Did react render better than turbo or the opposite? I assume a well-optimized turbo page would perform better
React destroyed perf and used more resources than turbo
Was there any discussion to use something other than react?
That's what I figured and has been my experience as well.
GitLab isn't much better right now either unfortunately.
Until paying customers start leaving en masse, they will continue to shovel out subpar service.
It's time to look for a decentralized Non-Hub alternative.
Github without hub? I don't think that exists.
Email?
More like Git, without the Hub. Perhaps the Hub aspects can be stored in Git as well?
I'm somewhat surprised with Github's strategy in the AI times.
I understand how appealing it is to build an AI coding agent and all that, but shouldn't they - above everything else - make sure they remain THE platform for code distribution, collaboration and alike? And it doesnt need to be humans, that can be agents as well.
They should serve the AI agent world first and foremost. Cause if they dont pull that off, and dont pull off building one of the best coding agents - whcih so far they didnt - there isn't much left.
There's so many new features needed in this new world. Really unclear why we hear so little about it, while maintainers smack the alarm bell that they're drowning in slop.
Microsoft’s real goal is selling Copilot seats and pushing Azure, not building a neutral playground for third-party agents. There is just no money for them in being the backend for someone else's AI. As for the AI spam, GitHub's internal metrics have always been tied to engagement and PR volume. Blocking all that AI slop would instantly drop their growth numbers, so it is easier for them to just pass the cleanup cost onto open-source maintainers.
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.
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).
Feb 10th post OP;
More recently:
Addressing GitHub's recent availability issues
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-gi...
(with a smattering of submissions here the last few weeks but no discussion)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47315878
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.
If this were a place for memes, then I'd share that swimming pool meme with Microsoft holding up copilot while GitHub is drowning.
Then Azure Dev Ops (formerly known as Visual Studio Team System) dead o n the ocean floor.
Although given how badly GitHub seems to be doing, perhaps it's better to be ignored.
why is az devops on the floor? i am having to choose between the clients existing az dops and our internal gitlab for where to host a pipeline, and i don't know what would be good at all
It works fine,it just feels like it has been under a kind of maintenance mode for a while.
There's clearly one small team that works on it. There are pros and cons to that.
It hasn't even got an obnoxious Copilot button yet for example, but on the other hand it was only relatively recently you could properly edit comments in markdown.
If the client has existing AzDo Pipelines then I'd suggest keeping them there.
It operated with an independent CEO for a long while.
When I saw his interview: https://thenewstack.io/github-ceo-on-why-well-still-need-hum... i thought "oh, there is some semblance of sanity at Microsoft".
This was after seeing those ridiculous PRs where microsoft engineers patiently deconstructed AI slop PRs they were forced to deal with on the open source repos they maintained.
When he was gone a few months later and github was folded into microsoft's org chart the writing was firmly on the wall.
He was never truly independent though. The org structure was such that the GitHub CEO reported up through a Microsoft VP and Satya. He was never really a CEO after the acquisition, it was in name only.
Also of note is that the Microsoft org chart always showed GitHub in that structure while the org chart available to GitHub stopped at their CEO. Its not that they were finally rolled into Microsoft's org chart so much as they lifted the veil and stopped pretending.
I never said he was "truly independent" nor meant to imply it.
Nonetheless it looks like he was both willing and able to push back on a good deal of the AI stupidity raining down from above and then he was removed and then, well, this...
ITT lots of complaining, not much building. Microsoft does not give a fuck what you think - they only care if the revenue line goes up. And the revenue line keeps going up despite this instability. Want to build the next unicorn? Build a GitHub competitor.
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
What does Microsoft stand for?
Making Incrementally Crappier Repositories, Operating Systems, Office and any Future Technology
Think the world would be a better place if 70-80% uptime were more tolerated. We really don’t need everything available all the time. More time to talk to each other, to think, more “slow time”.
Just don’t like the slop that’s getting us there.
Maybe they need to improve release strategy with Copilot AI Review =)
Cheap, fast, and good. I see which two they chose.
They didn't even choose two, only one :)
Two?
I wonder if they are still running on a single MySQL machine
They are not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xl24s_0mZs
The article mentions some concerns related to migrating their MySQL clusters off bare metal.
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
It always starts out good enough, but the reason they pursue horizontal integration is that it ensures that you won't be able to get out even if (when) you eventually want to. You'll be as glued as a fly to flypaper.
That's the reason you hear the complaints: they're from people who no longer want to be using this product but have no choice.
Because Microsoft doesn't need to innovate or even provide good service to keep the flies glued, they do what they've been doing: focus all their resources on making the glue stickier rather than focusing on making people want to stay even if they had an option to leave.
We use GH and are investing more in the platform features.
Codespaces specifically is quite good for agent heavy teams. Launch a full stack runtime for PRs that are agent owned.
I do not doubt people are having issues and I'm sure there have been outages and problems, but none that have affected my work for weeks.GH is many things to many teams and my sense is that some parts of it are currently less stable than others. But the overall package is still quite good and delivers a lot of value, IMO.
There is a bit of an echo chamber effect with GH to some degree.
They got acquired by Microsoft.
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...
We've jumped ship to self-hosted Jenkins. Woodpecker CI looks cool but Jenkins seemed like a safer bet for us. It's been well worth the effort and it's simplified and sped up our CI massively.
Once we got the email that they were going to charge for self-hosted runners that was the final nail in the coffin for us. They walked it back but we've lost faith entirely in the platform and vision.
Three nines is more than enough
In the future, no one will need more than one and a half nines.
"Agreed on the echo chamber point. For solo indie projects the overhead of GH Actions adds up though — I moved to self-hosted deploys and cut the complexity significantly. Different tradeoffs for teams vs solo."
Just use git, problem solved.
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
Why dont they just vibecode their way into stability? /s
Not owned by companies that help the US Federal Government illegally spy on their own citizens and murder children overseas:
Gitlab
Bitbucket
Sourceforge
Forgejo
Codeberg
Radicle
Launchpad
Owned by companies that help the US Federal Government illegally spy on their own citizens and murder children overseas:
Github
Codeberg is nice.
Neither Forgejo nor Codeberg are owned by _any_ company. Very important distinction.
Anyone who used the phrase "measly" in relation to three nines is inadvertently admitting their lack of knowledge in massive systems. 99.9 and 99.95 is the target for some of the most common systems you use all day and is by no means easy to achieve. Even just relying on a couple regional AWS services will put your CEILING at three nines. It's even more embarrassing when people post that one GH uptime tracker that combines many services into 1 single number as if that means anything useful.
Three 9s is a perfectly reasonable bar to expect for services you depend on. Without GitHub my company cannot deploy code. There is no alternative method to patch prod. In addition many development activities are halted, wasting labor costs.
We wouldn’t couple so much if we knew reliability would be this low. It will influence future decisions.