Github has published some incredible usage rate increase numbers, which they ascribe to the rise of agentic coding. At some point, they are going to have to change rate limits, cut free-tier usage, or find some other path to reducing load. It's clear that their infrastructure can't keep up with this significant increase, and it's unlikely that they're going to just absorb the increased costs themselves.
Very curious to see what the future holds for Github.
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.
So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and
strengthening GitHub’s core features.
After the Microsoft acquisition GH marketing and pricing put an immense amount of effort[1] into trying to kill secondary platforms that integrated into github and move more corporate accounts fully on-platform. We recently dropped travis for github actions and dropped reviewable for github PRs (which are terrible).
There's a portion of this that is agentic driven and there's a portion of this that's just github making their own bed.
1. Arguably anticompetitive pricing like MSFT is used to doing with the office suite.
This is extremely interesting how fast this happened. Either AI use surged massively in the last quarter, or this is a very sneaky move by Anthropic. Looking at my own stats, I don't think I'm using Claude Code much more than I used to, but my commits have gone way up. I have a feeling they've tuned the models recently to commit more often, which gives the illusion of more work being done.
1. Models have got way better, which means you are far more likely to get something working. I know I used to have little 'tool'/'weekend projects' all the time that wouldn't get off the starting blocks before, now it takes a few minutes often to build them, and once I've built them I tend to want to have them saved on github. Quite how useful they turn out to be is another question though...
2. Related, because the models are a lot better I can generate far more code per unit time. On Sonnet last year I'd have to babysit the model and constantly 'steer' it, which meant a lot of the CC time was actually me reviewing it. Now with Opus4.7 it can often just churn away for 10-30minutes and get something reasonable.
3. Most importantly, just the volume of new users to coding agents - loads of new developers shipping far more far frequently.
4. Many users who were not on github, now signing up and pushing code to it. "Vibe coders" basically who don't have SWE experience and their agent tells them git would be a good idea.
Each of these would be a big increase in scale, but combined it is vvv high
> Either AI use surged massively in the last quarter
December 2025 is considered by many people to be a major step function in agentic coding (both due to improvements in harnesses and LLMs themselves). I know my coding has forever changed since then.
Before I was basically always hands on the keyboard while working with AI. Now I'm running experiments with multiple agents over the weekend, only periodically checking in if they have any questions or need further instruction.
The last quarter is where I personally first started to see how this was all going to change things (despite having worked on both the research and product side of AI for the last few years).
> I have a feeling they've tuned the models recently to commit more often, which gives the illusion of more work being done.
Agents certainly are committing more often, but I know, at least for these projects, there really is work being done. An example: I had an agent auto-researching a forecast I was working on. This is something I've done manually for over a decade now. The iteration process is tedious and time consuming, and would often take weeks of setting up and ultimately poorly documenting many, many experiments to see what works. Now I can "set it and forget it", and get the same results I would have in hours (with much more surface area covered and much better documentation). Each experiment is a branch (or work-tree) so yes there are a lot of commits happening, but the results are measurably real.
I often think the big divide the success with agents is whether or not the quality of ones work can be objectively measured. For those of use doing work that can be measured, the impact of agents is still hard to comprehend.
It really shouldn't. The technical summary they released[1] is a very interesting read from a software engineering perspective. It seems to be blindsided by the increased traffic and gives stats related to commits/PRs (which should be relatively cheap for github to process) without any insight into their web traffic or details on how much actions are costing them. If they were super transparent they'd release information about their request response time and resourcing to fulfill that.
Their current path to resolution is to migrate their codebase to a new language[2], continue to drop their inhouse ops for Azure resources and get off MySQL. Maybe one or two of those steps are legitimately a good idea - I don't have an inside scope - but technology migrations are always fraught with issues. It's quite possible these changes are just a result of them vibe-coding a mature codebase into a new language.
2. I'll grant that Ruby isn't the best language to use as scale but I think we're all old enough to realize that language choice is far less impactful on performance than code quality.
And how many of those actions do uncached downloads instead of building self-contained offline images... Speaking of which, I wonder if GitHub has implemented any HTTP interception for common mirror sites, like used by apt, etc.
For literally decades, I’ve observed that there are systems that make each operation cheap and systems that work hard to scale out. The former frequently seems to wildly outperform the latter.
GitHub, for example, seems to implement the main repository /pulls page as a search query, which is hinted at by the prefilled search bar and was mostly confirmed last week when the search backend failed and pull requests didn’t load. But it could have been implemented as a plain API call that just loads open pull requests, and that API exists and did not go down.
If GitHub focused a bit on identifying their top 95% of high level operations (page loads including resulting API calls, for example) and making them efficient, I bet they could get a 5x or better reduction in backend load by simplifying them.
(Don’t even get me started on the diff viewer. I realize that much of its awfulness is the horribly inefficient front end, which does not directly load the back end, but I expect there is plenty of room for improvement. The plain git command line features are very fast.)
I noticed the same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940213. My working hypothesis is that, given that a filter was always required (prs and issues are likely rows in the same database with a bool property to distinguish them), someone thought it'd be good to use the search API uniformly. But search is on the derivative of the underlying data, in contrast to the specific APIs for listing issues and prs.
Git itself is kind of a fundamentally computationally inefficient way to store and retrieve information. If the problem to solve were simply "store and version this text", 14 billion commits in a year would not even be considered a lot.
In other words, a centralized version control system built from the ground up to operate at scale would do far more for scalability than anything GitHub could possibly do to optimize their Git operations. Every major tech company (Amazon, Meta, Google, etc) is already doing something like this internally.
Though this would require people to start using a github-specific client rather than the traditional git+ssh. (Though the github client could still maintain a git repo locally, for compat.)
What are you referring to when you say it's "fundamentally computationally inefficient"? It's pretty efficient because it's content-addressed, plus optimizations to reduce storage and data transfer with packfiles.
I think you need to broaden your focus here - I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories.
Microsoft bought Github and migrated to Azure, which is explains the findings. The query performance was fine before they started serving from Azure.
I mean honestly, as though there isn't one single person competent enough to read some logs and horizontally scale a few read only dbs to meet demand? That's not it
> I think you need to broaden your focus here - I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories.
This is the opposite of my recollection, actually. I distinctly remember having conversations about Github struggling to scale well before MS was involved, and people claiming that MS had somehow saved Github because it had stabilized and begun adding features again.
> The query performance was fine before they started serving from Azure.
This may be correct though. The Azure migration seems more aligned with the timeline of struggling to scale.
IMO, they're reaching the point of no return. I don't think they can horizontally-scale their way out of the hole they dug themselves unless they separate their free and paid infra maybe... which doesn't seem likely considering how their other infra changes are going.
In the same way you need to be 10x better for someone to consider switching to your product, if you get 10x worse your competitors get a free 10x by just standing still.
I think there's a very good chance you're right. Their reputation is obviously severely harmed, and high profile projects like Ghostty leaving may be a canary in the coalmine.
Something creative like separating their free and paid tiers may help them. I suspect the fact that all of this is happening to them along with their migration to Azure is probably complicating their ability to adapt their infrastructure.
I wonder if AWS resurrecting CodeCommit might be related. "For all of our warts, we still have a higher rep score than github" would not be an extraordinary thought at this point. There has been some brief chat about looking to github, and I'm so glad we never did. A previous company did migrate to github with no real answers on what the benefit was other than investors ask if your code is in github by name vs some other repo.
IIRC back in the day they used to have an on-prem Enterprise product? I've never heard of anyone who actually used it though. IMO that would make a lot of sense for a medium-large organization--you still get the familiar Github product but you can take responsibility for your own uptime--like with Jira, Jenkins (nee Hudson), PyPI/Maven/etc.
Satya Nadella at the LlamaCon event in April 2025: "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software."
In particular Github, with it's copilot-next initiative, has probably so much AI generated code inside today that fixing all this new performance problems will need lots of human developer brains.
Isn't the data that flows through Github so valuable that they (Microsoft) are happy to eat the cost?
I don't have a clear idea how that value can be captured, since it's going to be 90% AI generated code that anyone can scrape (public projects) or can't be used (private projects), so perhaps you're right.
> Isn't the data they capture so valuable that they (Microsoft) are happy to eat the cost?
Even if that is true, unless the value of the data corresponds to near-term revenue, then eventually the cost may simply not be possible to meet. Or for that matter, the capital to manage the increasing load may simply not exist - it does not matter how much valuable data you have, if the supply of hardware cannot keep up with your demand.
Also, I suspect that most of the "data" obtained by the incessant hammering on GitHub is not very valuable. Most business code is routine, and getting Copilot to help out with generating enormous amounts of it may not contribute much in return.
And it isn't even clear yet if the AI generated code is even particularly valuable since it's legally ambiguous as to whether or not any human ownership can be attributed to it.
The USPTO has declined copyrightability for genai artwork, it's only a matter of time before the same question comes up about code.
Your claim is incorrect. Something purely AI generated may not be covered by copyright in the US. That would make it more valuable to MS as you can reuse it as you like.
However, works with significant human input are covered by copyright, and most code does have such input. Human review, and correction is very common. There is a lot of AI generated code out there, and there are no cases challenging the copyright on it.
You also need to look beyond US law. Software is a global business and most software businesses do not want to write software they can only sell in certain countries.
> However, works with significant human input are covered by copyright, and most code does have such input. Human review, and correction is very common. There is a lot of AI generated code out there, and there are no cases challenging the copyright on it.
Legislation and court decisions still pending. There are numerous lawsuits about copyrigtability of output, and right of use of copyrighted work by LLMs, and both could have ramifications for code. I don't see how it's materially different to tell Claude Code to write you a function fetching an entry from a database, and telling ChatGPT to generate you a picture of a unicorn riding a bicycle. Both have the same level of input (desired end goal), both might go through review and updates (no, pink unicorn; no, cache the database connection).
Legal challenges over code copyright are relatively rare nowadays, so I wouldn't take lack of high profile lawsuits as proof of legality / copyrightability.
And yes, this will also depend on jurisdiction. Court decisions or laws can change that. Litigation over copyright infringement via training and reproduction is ongoing in multiple jurisdiction, and it wouldn't be shocking to me if at least some decide that it is indeed copyright infringement to pirate content to train LLMs that can reproduce it.
If that function is all you ask it to write as a one off, maybe. However, if that function is part of a larger system that is human designed it is very different. If you review and correct the code in the system it is very different.
> I don't have a clear idea how that value can be captured, since it's going to be 90% AI generated code that anyone can scrape (public projects) or can't be used (private projects), so perhaps you're right.
The value is probably in knowing which AI-generated code ends up being pushed or discarded, which can't be derived from public projects. This information can then be used to finetune the next big model so it only generates the "good" code.
It's a bit hard to blindly trust their numbers when they are trying very hard to sell Copilot to everyone.
Sure, AI will undoubtedly have increased their workload, but how much of the shown figures is real, and how much is the PR department trying to make it look like Copilot & friends is a massive success?
Not comparable at all. Xbox would be mostly transient traffic. It's probably not much more than packet forwarding for a lot of traffic.
Github is a giant complicated stateful mess with a lot of reads and writes. It also has a lot of features at this point. Hard to scale and hard to optimize.
IMO that site overcounts downtime. If you filter for major and critical outages (the kind that make the front page of HN), the story is still bad but it’s not 84.92% bad.
I think it's like some kind of collective inferiority complex. Nobody really understands things anymore but everyone is afraid to point out mistakes of others because they are scared to come under scrutiny themselves then.
Why is it easier to submit a bug report if my bug reporting system is run by the same company as your code repository? Why are those things even slightly related?
AI agents have changed the scalability properties of basically the entire internet.
It used to be that GitHub could rely on a finite number of people interacting with their platform in real human ways in real observable patterns. So I'm assuming that they scale for those patterns, and optimize for the UI and UX hotspots.
But now everyone's got a moltbot running 24/7, sometimes many, and it's completely overloading a lot of services. Especially services like GitHub which are very much agent-centric nowadays.
Microsoft forces AI usage down everyone's throats.
AI bot usage takes down github.
I have to assume that there are some serious fights going on between the poor SRE teams wanting to throttle bots, and MS not wanting to do anything to dissuade AI usage.
It's not new, it's just a DoS, which is a serious crime, just report the attacker to the police if in your country, or block their IP if not. If done accidentally, it's likely not a crime but the police will still scare them to stop doing it.
>AI agents have changed the scalability properties of basically the entire internet.
Why is GH the only service provider seeing such consistently bad availability then? Everyone has had to scale massively all the time, if GH is choosing moltbots capacity over basic availability for the rest of the humans, they have made the wrong choice.
Some people really abuse the f out of the system in a way optimized to take github down. Like they push every minute or for every commit instead of with certain time intervals (e.g. a single push a few times a day for each repo).
I follow some of the accounts that run 24/7 agent sesssion. Their projects are not even that novel for the number of commits that appear on the profile. Many of the commits have the log of beads, claude session etc (no change to the actual code). Some of them are ports of some projects to another language.
AI surely will increase the productivity, but the waste and noise that some people are willing to commit ....
Any centralized solution like GitHub is going to suffer the same fate as vibe coding chokes these services. The only option to have high uptime is to self host and most organizations can't do that easily. Time will tell if GitHub can scale up enough to meet demand.
It's a nice thought but I think the revealed preference from the history of the internet is that people actually only want centralised services, no matter what they say they want.
People love to clown on the fediverse because of having to choose a server. Which is no different from email. I guess the difference is that their ISP used to give them email.
Things are a lot better in Europe. I stopped working hours before this incident started, and I can't really remember any major work-stopping indicents in the past months. I only remember once trying to do hobby stuff in the evening that was impacted recently.
At this point, "GH is down" posts are competing with "Newest LLM Hype" for the HN front-page week over week.
For my personal project, I've been considering moving everything over to Codeberg. Stability of GH being one reason, but I also like the idea of an alternative that is not strictly tied to a big tech company.
And yet, you haven’t. That’s the problem with dominant platforms: Slight inconveniences + inertia are enough to ensure no-one moves (even without monopolistic abuse – and I’m talking about Microsoft here).
It feels weird (sad?) that I'm starting to get a sixth sense for when Github is going to a service disruption.
About an hour ago, clicking "Resolve Conversation" in a Pull Request failed a few times with an error message that appeared lower on the page (outside the viewport), and which I did not see the first few times. I had to reload the page after every few actions to get the server to register new ones.
I told a colleague, and added "Github might be having an issue with some other service, and it's just bleeding over to PR comments? Maybe it will snowball into a larger outage?"
Copilot is fully independent of the code forge parts of GitHub, so I would imagine it’s running on completely different infrastructure, without any hard dependencies on the Rails monolith.
Honestly, I hate "free tiers" for SAAS products like this.
For about 5 minutes, Google had a pay-as-you-go service on GCP for git. I used to use that, because I wanted to own my stuff. But (I guess) because everyone used "free" github -- and like a lot of other Google services -- they sunsetted it.
So now I'm using github for free. But would rather pay for my storage an usage with a (big) cloud provider.
This is really getting ridiculous - although people sometimes dismiss the "missing" status page because it includes copilot, it's worth noting that pull requests (95.5%) are even lower availability than copilot (96.4%).
How am I expected to comment "LGTM" if I can't even get to the PR?
Would it reduce their load if every AI instance both local and centralized had their own local git repo (and/or Gerrit instance) and then only committed for a sub-set of specific conditions were met?
The best time for GH to increase prices was 6 months ago, or so. No service is going to weather the storm of agentic code overload unscathed. But at least they could become an expensive-but-working solution instead of the sad comedy they're now, and thus keep their most lucrative customers.
I do not like why git doesn't have a built in bug or issue tracker and a kanban board or something.
I wished Git and Fossil hybrid should have won.
I thought about using fossil many times but it seems codex and claude have deeper integration with git.
I don't like installing software which keeps growing into infinite feature Monster. Maybe I'll install gitea or forgjo idk.
That's the last piece of puzzle remaining for me I've already mastered deployment and HA on bare metal from OVH and Hertzner, already have scaled to tons of users
GitHub is actively used to do code review and bug tracking. There is a number of tools that offer it on top of git, in a distributed way, but it means that yo need to install them locally on every machine involved.
What's worse, GitHub is widely used as a CI/CD solution, it runs massive amount of build pipelines and test suites. There is a ton of players in this space, too.
GitHub's main value proposition was having all these things in one place, as a convenient web app, for free or for moderate money. So they're crushed by the success of their model.
"I thought about using fossil many times but it seems codex and claude have deeper integration with git."
Don't let "agentic" "coding" be the reason to avoid fossil.
Fossil and other VCS are much easier for humans to use than Git is; there's no reason to have an LLM burning up tokens and the environment to do tasks you'd do yourself quickly and correctly.
I keep wondering what causing such a bad service from GH lately, is it the overuse of AI generated code? Are they trying to cut costs with the infrastructure?
> Is everyone just creating giant piles of throwaway slop?
yes, like the crypto or productivity 'industry', where every project exists to manage your other crypto and productivity projects, the dynamic of 'AI programming' seems to be to make software to manage your other two dozen AI things
mysteriously enough, big open source projects that people actually use in the real world aren't seeing their issues closed at any higher rates, almost as if that requires actual maintenance and programming (which Fred Brooks told us this half a century ago)
There was a post from Github a few weeks ago showing commit volume exploded from linear to exponential growth about 6 months ago. I don't know for sure, but I think they weren't ready for the scale out. Whether that means actual scaling issues or cost cutting because of the scale out, who knows.
Honestly, if GH keeps getting worse I may need to migrate away to Forgejo or something. The problem is GHA... Does anyone know of a service that is better and doesn't charge me an arm and a leg for runners (particularly MacOS ones)? I've been wanting to shift away from GHA for ages (because I hate it) but I don't know of any alternatives that are quite like it (or the costs involved).
"Ultimately, if more companies treated the framework as an extension of the application, it would result in higher resilience and stability. Investment in Rails ensures your foundation will not crumble under the weight of your application. Treating it as an unimportant part of your application is a mistake and many, many leaders make this mistake."
https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...
Probably the solution is not using the centralized Github for all work related to agentic coding but rather a distributed/local github repository from get go. This way only what hits the centralized github and becomes public, is something vetted and signed off by the human in the loop, hopefully reducing the AI slop and increasing the quality of commits.
_Usually_ the blast radius isn't "GH is down globally across all functionality". So it can work for you while still being either down for other regions, or at least degraded.
Pushing commits over SSH is often the most "reliable" thing, though you can get some fun situations where a commit is pushed and runners never ran, causing downstream FUN eventually.
The amount of damage Github has done to its brand is something so phenomenal that I think it might be studied in future case studies. Skype and Github were two microsoft products which everyone used until they degraded it. Windows itself can be included in it too now.
Keep in mind that it's easy to call someone else incompetent whenever their thing doesn't work, but we have no full idea what's going on behind the scenes. They could be very competent people in an unwinnable situation (like being forced to use Azure).
The goals for code-versioning as they existed decades back, might be sliding into irrelevance now. Code is no longer a direct work artifact from humans, as it used to be. Back in the day, people wanted to persist their code and it's changes, because code was hard to write and test. People didn't use a versioning system for their compiled binaries though, because it was a machine output and can be created from source code. But there was no higher level "source" for generating the code itself. Now things have changed. We need to check what exactly is the human artifact that requires treasuring, persisting and versioning.
Flawed reasoning all around. Machine code and object code will look the same given the same source code, target platform, compilation and linkin params etc. How is AI-Slop-Code even close to that?
Github has published some incredible usage rate increase numbers, which they ascribe to the rise of agentic coding. At some point, they are going to have to change rate limits, cut free-tier usage, or find some other path to reducing load. It's clear that their infrastructure can't keep up with this significant increase, and it's unlikely that they're going to just absorb the increased costs themselves.
Very curious to see what the future holds for Github.
From the GitHub COO on April 3rd:
https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878They also had a recent blog post about availability: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
I don't envy the scaling issues the GitHub engineers are facing! #HugOps
After the Microsoft acquisition GH marketing and pricing put an immense amount of effort[1] into trying to kill secondary platforms that integrated into github and move more corporate accounts fully on-platform. We recently dropped travis for github actions and dropped reviewable for github PRs (which are terrible).
There's a portion of this that is agentic driven and there's a portion of this that's just github making their own bed.
1. Arguably anticompetitive pricing like MSFT is used to doing with the office suite.
This is extremely interesting how fast this happened. Either AI use surged massively in the last quarter, or this is a very sneaky move by Anthropic. Looking at my own stats, I don't think I'm using Claude Code much more than I used to, but my commits have gone way up. I have a feeling they've tuned the models recently to commit more often, which gives the illusion of more work being done.
Many things at once I suspect:
1. Models have got way better, which means you are far more likely to get something working. I know I used to have little 'tool'/'weekend projects' all the time that wouldn't get off the starting blocks before, now it takes a few minutes often to build them, and once I've built them I tend to want to have them saved on github. Quite how useful they turn out to be is another question though...
2. Related, because the models are a lot better I can generate far more code per unit time. On Sonnet last year I'd have to babysit the model and constantly 'steer' it, which meant a lot of the CC time was actually me reviewing it. Now with Opus4.7 it can often just churn away for 10-30minutes and get something reasonable.
3. Most importantly, just the volume of new users to coding agents - loads of new developers shipping far more far frequently.
4. Many users who were not on github, now signing up and pushing code to it. "Vibe coders" basically who don't have SWE experience and their agent tells them git would be a good idea.
Each of these would be a big increase in scale, but combined it is vvv high
> Either AI use surged massively in the last quarter
December 2025 is considered by many people to be a major step function in agentic coding (both due to improvements in harnesses and LLMs themselves). I know my coding has forever changed since then.
Before I was basically always hands on the keyboard while working with AI. Now I'm running experiments with multiple agents over the weekend, only periodically checking in if they have any questions or need further instruction.
The last quarter is where I personally first started to see how this was all going to change things (despite having worked on both the research and product side of AI for the last few years).
> I have a feeling they've tuned the models recently to commit more often, which gives the illusion of more work being done.
Agents certainly are committing more often, but I know, at least for these projects, there really is work being done. An example: I had an agent auto-researching a forecast I was working on. This is something I've done manually for over a decade now. The iteration process is tedious and time consuming, and would often take weeks of setting up and ultimately poorly documenting many, many experiments to see what works. Now I can "set it and forget it", and get the same results I would have in hours (with much more surface area covered and much better documentation). Each experiment is a branch (or work-tree) so yes there are a lot of commits happening, but the results are measurably real.
I often think the big divide the success with agents is whether or not the quality of ones work can be objectively measured. For those of use doing work that can be measured, the impact of agents is still hard to comprehend.
I don't think commits per se puts pressure on the infrastructure.
More likely pulls and pushes, and, naturally, the ci minutes they identify as the main issue.
But CI only increased by a factor of 2 since last year. Did they really not foresee that happening? And how does that affect git and api operations.
It really shouldn't. The technical summary they released[1] is a very interesting read from a software engineering perspective. It seems to be blindsided by the increased traffic and gives stats related to commits/PRs (which should be relatively cheap for github to process) without any insight into their web traffic or details on how much actions are costing them. If they were super transparent they'd release information about their request response time and resourcing to fulfill that.
Their current path to resolution is to migrate their codebase to a new language[2], continue to drop their inhouse ops for Azure resources and get off MySQL. Maybe one or two of those steps are legitimately a good idea - I don't have an inside scope - but technology migrations are always fraught with issues. It's quite possible these changes are just a result of them vibe-coding a mature codebase into a new language.
1. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
2. I'll grant that Ruby isn't the best language to use as scale but I think we're all old enough to realize that language choice is far less impactful on performance than code quality.
I wonder how many of those actions are really necessary
And how many of those actions do uncached downloads instead of building self-contained offline images... Speaking of which, I wonder if GitHub has implemented any HTTP interception for common mirror sites, like used by apt, etc.
Or how many pushes those commits are spread across; oh, neat, big number.
Wow, nice to see the relentless push for more AI slop finally paying back some dividents back to the issuer.
For literally decades, I’ve observed that there are systems that make each operation cheap and systems that work hard to scale out. The former frequently seems to wildly outperform the latter.
GitHub, for example, seems to implement the main repository /pulls page as a search query, which is hinted at by the prefilled search bar and was mostly confirmed last week when the search backend failed and pull requests didn’t load. But it could have been implemented as a plain API call that just loads open pull requests, and that API exists and did not go down.
If GitHub focused a bit on identifying their top 95% of high level operations (page loads including resulting API calls, for example) and making them efficient, I bet they could get a 5x or better reduction in backend load by simplifying them.
(Don’t even get me started on the diff viewer. I realize that much of its awfulness is the horribly inefficient front end, which does not directly load the back end, but I expect there is plenty of room for improvement. The plain git command line features are very fast.)
I noticed the same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940213. My working hypothesis is that, given that a filter was always required (prs and issues are likely rows in the same database with a bool property to distinguish them), someone thought it'd be good to use the search API uniformly. But search is on the derivative of the underlying data, in contrast to the specific APIs for listing issues and prs.
Are you telling me you don’t want a chat interface to greet you when you log in to GitHub?
Git itself is kind of a fundamentally computationally inefficient way to store and retrieve information. If the problem to solve were simply "store and version this text", 14 billion commits in a year would not even be considered a lot.
In other words, a centralized version control system built from the ground up to operate at scale would do far more for scalability than anything GitHub could possibly do to optimize their Git operations. Every major tech company (Amazon, Meta, Google, etc) is already doing something like this internally.
Though this would require people to start using a github-specific client rather than the traditional git+ssh. (Though the github client could still maintain a git repo locally, for compat.)
What are you referring to when you say it's "fundamentally computationally inefficient"? It's pretty efficient because it's content-addressed, plus optimizations to reduce storage and data transfer with packfiles.
I think you need to broaden your focus here - I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories.
Microsoft bought Github and migrated to Azure, which is explains the findings. The query performance was fine before they started serving from Azure.
I mean honestly, as though there isn't one single person competent enough to read some logs and horizontally scale a few read only dbs to meet demand? That's not it
> I think you need to broaden your focus here - I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories.
This is the opposite of my recollection, actually. I distinctly remember having conversations about Github struggling to scale well before MS was involved, and people claiming that MS had somehow saved Github because it had stabilized and begun adding features again.
> The query performance was fine before they started serving from Azure.
This may be correct though. The Azure migration seems more aligned with the timeline of struggling to scale.
I don't know why this is downvoted. The data backs you up: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
I mean, are any of the other forges, which I presume are also seeing logarithmic increase in commits, also failing as hard as Github?
IMO, they're reaching the point of no return. I don't think they can horizontally-scale their way out of the hole they dug themselves unless they separate their free and paid infra maybe... which doesn't seem likely considering how their other infra changes are going.
In the same way you need to be 10x better for someone to consider switching to your product, if you get 10x worse your competitors get a free 10x by just standing still.
[delayed]
I think there's a very good chance you're right. Their reputation is obviously severely harmed, and high profile projects like Ghostty leaving may be a canary in the coalmine.
Something creative like separating their free and paid tiers may help them. I suspect the fact that all of this is happening to them along with their migration to Azure is probably complicating their ability to adapt their infrastructure.
I wonder if AWS resurrecting CodeCommit might be related. "For all of our warts, we still have a higher rep score than github" would not be an extraordinary thought at this point. There has been some brief chat about looking to github, and I'm so glad we never did. A previous company did migrate to github with no real answers on what the benefit was other than investors ask if your code is in github by name vs some other repo.
IIRC back in the day they used to have an on-prem Enterprise product? I've never heard of anyone who actually used it though. IMO that would make a lot of sense for a medium-large organization--you still get the familiar Github product but you can take responsibility for your own uptime--like with Jira, Jenkins (nee Hudson), PyPI/Maven/etc.
I've been a strong proponent of reallocating all LinkedIn server capacity to GitHub.
this is an idea that i’d happily get behind.
They can't really cite the situation as a problem given their hand in creating and continuing it.
It's hard to talk about "them" as a singular entity. I bet that the "Copilot all the things!!11" faction mostly does not consist of GitHub SREs.
The GitHub SREs are working for the Copilot company.
Satya Nadella at the LlamaCon event in April 2025: "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software."
In particular Github, with it's copilot-next initiative, has probably so much AI generated code inside today that fixing all this new performance problems will need lots of human developer brains.
It literally have problems the moment MS bought it, way before AI gold rush.
The sysadmins didn't make any of those decisions.
I suppose the idiocy of their parent company is their job security.
Isn't the data that flows through Github so valuable that they (Microsoft) are happy to eat the cost?
I don't have a clear idea how that value can be captured, since it's going to be 90% AI generated code that anyone can scrape (public projects) or can't be used (private projects), so perhaps you're right.
> Isn't the data they capture so valuable that they (Microsoft) are happy to eat the cost?
Even if that is true, unless the value of the data corresponds to near-term revenue, then eventually the cost may simply not be possible to meet. Or for that matter, the capital to manage the increasing load may simply not exist - it does not matter how much valuable data you have, if the supply of hardware cannot keep up with your demand.
Also, I suspect that most of the "data" obtained by the incessant hammering on GitHub is not very valuable. Most business code is routine, and getting Copilot to help out with generating enormous amounts of it may not contribute much in return.
> 90% AI generated code
And it isn't even clear yet if the AI generated code is even particularly valuable since it's legally ambiguous as to whether or not any human ownership can be attributed to it.
The USPTO has declined copyrightability for genai artwork, it's only a matter of time before the same question comes up about code.
Your claim is incorrect. Something purely AI generated may not be covered by copyright in the US. That would make it more valuable to MS as you can reuse it as you like.
However, works with significant human input are covered by copyright, and most code does have such input. Human review, and correction is very common. There is a lot of AI generated code out there, and there are no cases challenging the copyright on it.
You also need to look beyond US law. Software is a global business and most software businesses do not want to write software they can only sell in certain countries.
> However, works with significant human input are covered by copyright, and most code does have such input. Human review, and correction is very common. There is a lot of AI generated code out there, and there are no cases challenging the copyright on it.
Legislation and court decisions still pending. There are numerous lawsuits about copyrigtability of output, and right of use of copyrighted work by LLMs, and both could have ramifications for code. I don't see how it's materially different to tell Claude Code to write you a function fetching an entry from a database, and telling ChatGPT to generate you a picture of a unicorn riding a bicycle. Both have the same level of input (desired end goal), both might go through review and updates (no, pink unicorn; no, cache the database connection).
Legal challenges over code copyright are relatively rare nowadays, so I wouldn't take lack of high profile lawsuits as proof of legality / copyrightability.
And yes, this will also depend on jurisdiction. Court decisions or laws can change that. Litigation over copyright infringement via training and reproduction is ongoing in multiple jurisdiction, and it wouldn't be shocking to me if at least some decide that it is indeed copyright infringement to pirate content to train LLMs that can reproduce it.
If that function is all you ask it to write as a one off, maybe. However, if that function is part of a larger system that is human designed it is very different. If you review and correct the code in the system it is very different.
Pages 27 and 28 of this are relevant to this: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
> I don't have a clear idea how that value can be captured, since it's going to be 90% AI generated code that anyone can scrape (public projects) or can't be used (private projects), so perhaps you're right.
The value is probably in knowing which AI-generated code ends up being pushed or discarded, which can't be derived from public projects. This information can then be used to finetune the next big model so it only generates the "good" code.
Its easier for them to scrape than it is for anyone else. they also have a lot more meta data about the code which may be useful.
Do Github terms entirely prevent them from making use of data in private projects.
> or can't be used (private projects)
As if they cared about that
It's a bit hard to blindly trust their numbers when they are trying very hard to sell Copilot to everyone.
Sure, AI will undoubtedly have increased their workload, but how much of the shown figures is real, and how much is the PR department trying to make it look like Copilot & friends is a massive success?
The same company operates the Xbox network. More daily active users and more events per second
Not comparable at all. Xbox would be mostly transient traffic. It's probably not much more than packet forwarding for a lot of traffic.
Github is a giant complicated stateful mess with a lot of reads and writes. It also has a lot of features at this point. Hard to scale and hard to optimize.
Xbox network was _designed_ for such concurrency, GitHub is Ruby on rails + vitess (mysql).
Do they run Xbox network on Azure or is it a separate thing?
Huh, so vibe coding really is the reason GitHub has been down so much lately!
Amazing that Microsoft didn't see this coming after aggressively pushing AI everywhere for years.
Can you share where did they published that?
Their COO has talked about it extensively on X. A sibling comment in this thread posted a link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011075
Github naturally scales horizontally.
Usage numbers is the PR reason. Vibecoding insanity in Microsoft is the more plausible actual culprit.
So maybe it's AI that's responsible for both ends. The increased traffic and the lessened product.
> Github naturally scales horizontally
Not necessarily, a few years ago they had some crucial information stuck in a single MySQL cluster (so write constrained) and were working on sharding it, but struggling: https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/partitioning-...
Github has 84.92% uptime in the last 90 days according to https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses
I don't know how this is even remotely close to acceptable.
IMO that site overcounts downtime. If you filter for major and critical outages (the kind that make the front page of HN), the story is still bad but it’s not 84.92% bad.
https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical
It isn't. Lots of unacceptable things going on these days and everyone seems to be accepting them just fine.
I think it's like some kind of collective inferiority complex. Nobody really understands things anymore but everyone is afraid to point out mistakes of others because they are scared to come under scrutiny themselves then.
Guarantee enterprises with SLAs aren't accepting them
We should make an alternative git site, but how to acquire users?
Make it nerdy enough to scare of agentic coders only. Also, blackjack and hookers are said to be helpful in such circumstances.
sourcehut is pretty close
Forgejo is a thing. But the headlines lately make it sound like it’s not in great shape either.
What do you need users for?
GH is not a social network
I don't know. Everyone seems to be using GitHub only because everyone else is using GitHub. Apparently that's important somehow. Me, I use "git init"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
It's a lot easier to get bug reports and fixes when everyone is on the same auth system.
That's why there is also a call for federated forges
Why is it easier to submit a bug report if my bug reporting system is run by the same company as your code repository? Why are those things even slightly related?
codeberg is doing fine
I, for one, am not paying them enough money to expect any better.
They can't even get two eights, let alone three nines.
Hey there's a nine in there, so it's fine!
ffs can we stop talking about that number and site already.
It treats any service being down as the entire platform being down which is nonsense.
It's just lying with statistics.
At least one 9 … somewhere
This is reaching an unacceptable level of performance. There isn't a week that work isn't interrupted by GH.
AI agents have changed the scalability properties of basically the entire internet.
It used to be that GitHub could rely on a finite number of people interacting with their platform in real human ways in real observable patterns. So I'm assuming that they scale for those patterns, and optimize for the UI and UX hotspots.
But now everyone's got a moltbot running 24/7, sometimes many, and it's completely overloading a lot of services. Especially services like GitHub which are very much agent-centric nowadays.
Microsoft buys github.
Microsoft forces AI usage down everyone's throats.
AI bot usage takes down github.
I have to assume that there are some serious fights going on between the poor SRE teams wanting to throttle bots, and MS not wanting to do anything to dissuade AI usage.
It's not new, it's just a DoS, which is a serious crime, just report the attacker to the police if in your country, or block their IP if not. If done accidentally, it's likely not a crime but the police will still scare them to stop doing it.
GH was going down before AI explosion. The start of the trend is MS buying it, not AI explosion, that is just final nail
>AI agents have changed the scalability properties of basically the entire internet.
Why is GH the only service provider seeing such consistently bad availability then? Everyone has had to scale massively all the time, if GH is choosing moltbots capacity over basic availability for the rest of the humans, they have made the wrong choice.
Some people really abuse the f out of the system in a way optimized to take github down. Like they push every minute or for every commit instead of with certain time intervals (e.g. a single push a few times a day for each repo).
I follow some of the accounts that run 24/7 agent sesssion. Their projects are not even that novel for the number of commits that appear on the profile. Many of the commits have the log of beads, claude session etc (no change to the actual code). Some of them are ports of some projects to another language. AI surely will increase the productivity, but the waste and noise that some people are willing to commit ....
It's been unacceptable for months, but now it's at the level of "we should actively look for alternatives".
Any centralized solution like GitHub is going to suffer the same fate as vibe coding chokes these services. The only option to have high uptime is to self host and most organizations can't do that easily. Time will tell if GitHub can scale up enough to meet demand.
It's a nice thought but I think the revealed preference from the history of the internet is that people actually only want centralised services, no matter what they say they want.
People love to clown on the fediverse because of having to choose a server. Which is no different from email. I guess the difference is that their ISP used to give them email.
Not really. It is possible to implement systems that handle a lot more scale than github has. This is proven by systems that exist today.
It might be hard to create such systems using ruby and microslop AI management though
A week? You're going to be happy with more than a day without an incident.
I lost track which Monday morning PST in a row this is.
Things are a lot better in Europe. I stopped working hours before this incident started, and I can't really remember any major work-stopping indicents in the past months. I only remember once trying to do hobby stuff in the evening that was impacted recently.
I would say we are way past unacceptable.
At this point, "GH is down" posts are competing with "Newest LLM Hype" for the HN front-page week over week.
For my personal project, I've been considering moving everything over to Codeberg. Stability of GH being one reason, but I also like the idea of an alternative that is not strictly tied to a big tech company.
Your name summarizes all the GitHub uptime crap.
And yet, you haven’t. That’s the problem with dominant platforms: Slight inconveniences + inertia are enough to ensure no-one moves (even without monopolistic abuse – and I’m talking about Microsoft here).
It feels weird (sad?) that I'm starting to get a sixth sense for when Github is going to a service disruption.
About an hour ago, clicking "Resolve Conversation" in a Pull Request failed a few times with an error message that appeared lower on the page (outside the viewport), and which I did not see the first few times. I had to reload the page after every few actions to get the server to register new ones.
I told a colleague, and added "Github might be having an issue with some other service, and it's just bleeding over to PR comments? Maybe it will snowball into a larger outage?"
Literally just had this same signal with PR review comments. Checked the status page, saw it was green, and (correctly) assumed “not for long!”
Hilariously, it looks like basically everything except Copilot is degraded. The jokes write themselves sometimes.
Copilot is fully independent of the code forge parts of GitHub, so I would imagine it’s running on completely different infrastructure, without any hard dependencies on the Rails monolith.
Copilot's full functionality is only fractionally useful compared to what's currently degraded.
2027: "GitHub is up!"
"Three 8s of availability"
I literally laughed out then shed a tear, because I'd actually take three 8s today.
Three eights is more than a month of downtime every year. Today is the three eights.
Reduce the free tier.
I’ve made 4000 commits in the last 2.5 months. That’s just to main. And I push up tons of artifacts daily for regression testing.
For $0.
GitHub should add a slop tax. Co-authored by Claude? Pay up. Em-dashes in comments? Pay up. A lot of code written in a short window of time? Pay up.
That's like 2 minutes of CPU usage for the repo part
Honestly, I hate "free tiers" for SAAS products like this.
For about 5 minutes, Google had a pay-as-you-go service on GCP for git. I used to use that, because I wanted to own my stuff. But (I guess) because everyone used "free" github -- and like a lot of other Google services -- they sunsetted it.
So now I'm using github for free. But would rather pay for my storage an usage with a (big) cloud provider.
Is this trending in relation to Ghostty moving away from github?
This is really getting ridiculous - although people sometimes dismiss the "missing" status page because it includes copilot, it's worth noting that pull requests (95.5%) are even lower availability than copilot (96.4%).
How am I expected to comment "LGTM" if I can't even get to the PR?
Would it reduce their load if every AI instance both local and centralized had their own local git repo (and/or Gerrit instance) and then only committed for a sub-set of specific conditions were met?
At least people are gaining knowledge of how to use the git remote command.
The best time for GH to increase prices was 6 months ago, or so. No service is going to weather the storm of agentic code overload unscathed. But at least they could become an expensive-but-working solution instead of the sad comedy they're now, and thus keep their most lucrative customers.
At this point we can just have a Bot repost this exact submission every day and it would be right more often than not.
It exists, but it runs as a github action, so it's not working right now.
That is beautiful
We couldn't, because HN prevents duplicate posts.
Is this finally the rise of the "multi-agentic os/platform" we've all been so eagerly awaiting?
Edit: the status page is still all green for today, but the incident is there.
pre-edit: They just removed the incident and set the status page to all green as of 10:01 PT???
They're trying to make it seem like it's not below 95% uptime really hard, so that might be the KPI they're trying to uphold.
I have been writing lots of code lately
And I still only have local git repository.
I do not like why git doesn't have a built in bug or issue tracker and a kanban board or something.
I wished Git and Fossil hybrid should have won.
I thought about using fossil many times but it seems codex and claude have deeper integration with git.
I don't like installing software which keeps growing into infinite feature Monster. Maybe I'll install gitea or forgjo idk.
That's the last piece of puzzle remaining for me I've already mastered deployment and HA on bare metal from OVH and Hertzner, already have scaled to tons of users
You might be interested in radicle: https://radicle.dev/faq#how-does-radicle-handle-issues-pull-...
Radicle supports issues directly as part of the git object database.
GitHub is actively used to do code review and bug tracking. There is a number of tools that offer it on top of git, in a distributed way, but it means that yo need to install them locally on every machine involved.
What's worse, GitHub is widely used as a CI/CD solution, it runs massive amount of build pipelines and test suites. There is a ton of players in this space, too.
GitHub's main value proposition was having all these things in one place, as a convenient web app, for free or for moderate money. So they're crushed by the success of their model.
"I thought about using fossil many times but it seems codex and claude have deeper integration with git."
Don't let "agentic" "coding" be the reason to avoid fossil.
Fossil and other VCS are much easier for humans to use than Git is; there's no reason to have an LLM burning up tokens and the environment to do tasks you'd do yourself quickly and correctly.
I keep wondering what causing such a bad service from GH lately, is it the overuse of AI generated code? Are they trying to cut costs with the infrastructure?
Everyone producing magnitude more code with AI agents. Numbers from GH COO here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
So why aren't we seeing an explosion in feature shipping rate, or tech startups?
If there is so much extra code, where is it going? Is everyone just creating giant piles of throwaway slop?
> Is everyone just creating giant piles of throwaway slop?
yes, like the crypto or productivity 'industry', where every project exists to manage your other crypto and productivity projects, the dynamic of 'AI programming' seems to be to make software to manage your other two dozen AI things
mysteriously enough, big open source projects that people actually use in the real world aren't seeing their issues closed at any higher rates, almost as if that requires actual maintenance and programming (which Fred Brooks told us this half a century ago)
There was a post from Github a few weeks ago showing commit volume exploded from linear to exponential growth about 6 months ago. I don't know for sure, but I think they weren't ready for the scale out. Whether that means actual scaling issues or cost cutting because of the scale out, who knows.
Something something staff reductions something
I think there should be another page 'GitHub is NOT down'. Needless to say, for all the other times it's Down.
Honestly, if GH keeps getting worse I may need to migrate away to Forgejo or something. The problem is GHA... Does anyone know of a service that is better and doesn't charge me an arm and a leg for runners (particularly MacOS ones)? I've been wanting to shift away from GHA for ages (because I hate it) but I don't know of any alternatives that are quite like it (or the costs involved).
One of the most satisfying (and sad that it’s needed) GH CLI extensions I’ve (publicly) vibe coded has been https://github.com/Houstonwp/gh-down
Although I think I still ironically end up finding out about the outages on HN first.
It'd be more useful to inform us when it is working at this point
I couldn't merge earlier but navigation around my project worked. Maybe if I generate even more PRs some will get through!
they are testing the limits of ruby on rails.
"Ultimately, if more companies treated the framework as an extension of the application, it would result in higher resilience and stability. Investment in Rails ensures your foundation will not crumble under the weight of your application. Treating it as an unimportant part of your application is a mistake and many, many leaders make this mistake." https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...
Microslop happens.
I haven't seen Friendster-level stability like this in a long time.
If you have clowns bombarding the backend with agentic volume that is 200x the average, start charging them for usage.
This is not sustainable and hurts actual customers.
CircleCI seems to not have the same problem: https://status.circleci.com/
Probably the solution is not using the centralized Github for all work related to agentic coding but rather a distributed/local github repository from get go. This way only what hits the centralized github and becomes public, is something vetted and signed off by the human in the loop, hopefully reducing the AI slop and increasing the quality of commits.
Github vs cloudflare
Wow, GitHub are no longer serious people. Unbelievable.
worked for me pushing some commits about 20 minutes ago.
_Usually_ the blast radius isn't "GH is down globally across all functionality". So it can work for you while still being either down for other regions, or at least degraded.
Pushing commits over SSH is often the most "reliable" thing, though you can get some fun situations where a commit is pushed and runners never ran, causing downstream FUN eventually.
I’ve seen this behaviour but IMO it’s a fatal design flaw of Actions. It shouldn’t be possible.
I don't do that anymore, but I can still access repositories and issues. Looks normal to me
Soon on your favorite prediction markets.
re there polymarket bets on if gitub will be up or down today yet?
Selfhosted gitlab alpha versus the cloud Github beta
oh no, anyway...
The amount of damage Github has done to its brand is something so phenomenal that I think it might be studied in future case studies. Skype and Github were two microsoft products which everyone used until they degraded it. Windows itself can be included in it too now.
> Co-authored by Co-pilot
I'm moving everything to self hosted GitLab CE now. Will just use GitHub as a backup. This is so ridiculous at this point.
GitLab vs Forgejo? Personally run GitLab but looking at moving, due to it's massive size.
really need competitor for gh rn
Gitlab, Forgejo, maybe Codeberg all exist. Vote with your wallet, if you hold the purse strings.
Doesn't matter if your dependencies are still using GH
Then use one. There are so many.
it's git. Just do "git init" in some SSH accessible folder.
Is Git decentralized?
Git is, but with GitHub being treated as the golden repo for projects, it becomes the hub of other parts of development, like PRs and CI/CD pipelines.
Yes. But in practice people need their `if any_tasks_failed: throw error` (“CI”) to be in the cloud and have three nines of uptime.
Personally (but who am I) I don’t need to check whether my changes work on Windows 7 and SunOS in order to continue on a project most of the time.
If this was a business running on its own, without Microsoft’s capital and anti competitive practices, they would have been out of business by now.
This is genuinely pathetic. I wish I could do my job this poorly and still be employed.
https://careers.microsoft.com/
It's A Trap! ~ Admiral Ackbar
Keep in mind that it's easy to call someone else incompetent whenever their thing doesn't work, but we have no full idea what's going on behind the scenes. They could be very competent people in an unwinnable situation (like being forced to use Azure).
Here we go again...
The goals for code-versioning as they existed decades back, might be sliding into irrelevance now. Code is no longer a direct work artifact from humans, as it used to be. Back in the day, people wanted to persist their code and it's changes, because code was hard to write and test. People didn't use a versioning system for their compiled binaries though, because it was a machine output and can be created from source code. But there was no higher level "source" for generating the code itself. Now things have changed. We need to check what exactly is the human artifact that requires treasuring, persisting and versioning.
Flawed reasoning all around. Machine code and object code will look the same given the same source code, target platform, compilation and linkin params etc. How is AI-Slop-Code even close to that?
"looking same" is not the requirement. "Working same" is. With proper test harness, the generated code can be controlled to "work the same".
:) :) Sure buddy - mind showing me yours ?