GitHub was having issues
221 comments
·August 12, 2025everfrustrated
petcat
> GitHub is _easily_ the most unreliable SaaS product.
Some of us are stuck using Atlassian and BitBucket and it is by far worse in every way.
zemo
I used GitHub for years in the tech industry, then went into the games industry and used BitBucket and hated it, thought it was such a downgrade. Now I'm back in the tech industry and using GitHub, and I miss BitBucket.
lesuorac
Starting to pretty much desire tools that can do nothing but are just fast at their core competency.
Looking at PRs in github and then when toggling to the "files" tab it chocking up or being like "I don't want to display this file because its more than 100 lines" is like wtf you're whole point is to show me modified files.
bpye
> then went into the games industry and used BitBucket and hated it
At least it wasn't Perforce?
mrheosuper
Grass is always greener on the other side.
psygn89
I liked the UI of BitBucket more. Stuff I accessed frequently like commits and branches were tabs across the top, easy to reach from any page. Branch dropdown sort order was by most recently updated unlike GitHub where I have to search for it. Easy to diff files. This was like 4 or 5 years ago though, maybe it has gone through modernization/enshittification. GitHub feels a bit fragmented and it tries to be more performant by virtualizing some things but while BitBucket in some sense was more rudimentary and showed it all (bogging my machine down some), it allowed me to CTRL + F easily with more confidence whereas with virtualization I've had issues with it finding things and I couldn't 100% trust it.
nickitolas
Is games not a part of tech?
dosethree
Bitbucket is butt
sigio
It's also _by_far_ the cheapest, and most git-work can be done offline, so while it's inconvenient, it's not stopping all operations here.
ta1243
Depends how intergrated you are. If you're using it as a code repository fine, if you're tying your workflows into it with pull requests, actions, maybe a third party CI which ties to it, and use it as part of operations then it's a major problem
I just approved a PR which added a user to one of our AWS accounts for example, if github is down then that PR can't be approved, the update can't work and the user can't access that account
__natty__
Agree, atlassian products are much worse in terms of reliability.
enraged_camel
We use Jira. It's a horrendous product, but I cannot remember the last time it was down, unlike Github.
weberer
I've only had good experiences with Gitlab.
guywithahat
Funny, I've had the worst experience with gitlab. Bitbucket is the best experience I've had so far
JanMa
I used to maintain a self hosted instance of BitBucket and the user experience of it was actually very nice. We shut it down when Atlassian deprecated the self-hosted licenses. Moving to GitHub and GitHub Actions felt like a downgrade in more than a few ways
pmontra
Two customers of mine have been using Bitbucket and other Atlassian products. I remember a problem a few months ago, nothing else. Maybe I've been lucky, no accesses during the outages.
mmcnl
Bitbucket is quite nice actually. It's got very little bloat and just... works?
throwzasdf
Atlassian Jira and Confluence rock. Can't recall ever using BitBucket but Atlassians's products are top notch.
cddotdotslash
Companies should automate this. Write their own outage monitoring, feed the results, plus the cumbersome format you have to send to the provider, into an LLM, have it spit out an email requesting SLA credits or whatever the contract specifies.
Probably not worth it for low cost services, but if you’re paying GitHub $x millions per year, maybe it is.
colinbartlett
Some customers of my product, StatusGator, do this with our API. They can extract the outage data -- including the time when we detect the outage before its acknowledged. And then use that to get SLA credits.
ta1243
Why would I trust you to report
Its great that your specific product does this, but as a whole I have to monitor the service separately to keep you honest (well not you specifically, I'm sure you are honest and do as much as you can to be honest, but not every company is), and of course to monitor the problems I have which you don't detect.
WD-42
I think that was sarcasm
colechristensen
They intentionally underreport outages. Everybody does. When your performance metrics for your customers, managers, and individual contributors all include uptime, what you get isn't better uptime but lies about uptime.
zulban
> GitHub is _easily_ the most unreliable SaaS product.
I'm no fan of Microsoft either but when you say ridiculous things it's hard to take you seriously.
foobarchu
Is it that much hyperbole, assuming we ignore small fry SaaS? I've personally noticed at least three outages in the last few weeks alone.
Sure it's less impactful than some services since you don't need access to the website at all times, but the reliability is still really bad.
Wowfunhappy
> Is it that much hyperbole, assuming we ignore small fry SaaS?
Well there's Claude for starters.
ugh123
Customers should also then compare what the sales guy is telling you to your own metrics, and see how far off they are.
null
frmrghr
Former githubber anon posting a non main acct
You all should be running a small private git
Most teams could get buy with something like a tiny instance with snapshots every commit
AWS has too much skin in the game to be as unreliable as they used to be.
There's zero reason for a startup to use all these services anymore. The only reason they ever existed was big government manipulation of the labor market through ZIRP
It's far more set n forget to self host git than github will be
xyst
All this does is make some poor offshore schmuck toil away for hours trying to get this data.
If companies begin to _cancel_ their contracts with MSFT/GH because of a breach of SLAs, then maybe conditions will improve.
Reality: companies locked into multi year deals with MSFT including a MSFT-shit suite and windows licenses.
Migrating away from it will be expensive. MS knows this. Thus the reason why nothing will change.
RandallBrown
I've had much better luck with GitHub than GitLab and whatever Atlassian is calling their source control these days.
Still sounds like good advice though.
CoderJoshDK
With continued reliability issues and the CEO stepping down, now feels like such an opportune time for a competitor to start taking market share. I sure am rooting for it!
For the longest time, I thought that there was absolutely no way for some of these corner stone companies (slash tech) to be toppled. And I’m very impressed with their ability to destroy consumer trust!
shrinks99
Between Tangled, GitLab, Codeburg (Forgejo), and Gitea there's quite a lot of decent alternatives now compared to when GitHub first sold to MS. Having the entire world of FOSS integrated in one development platform was convenient but I'm more excited by the possibilities for more innovation in the space.
Lammy
And Phorge! (former Phabricator, and my favorite) https://we.phorge.it/
colechristensen
Sadly gitlab lacked focus especially on software quality.
evilmonkey19
I'm a fan of github but lately i'm seeing a lot of issues like these... Also they don't have yet support for IPv6 (surprising).
awestroke
The refusal to support IPv6 is embarrassing at this point
kevingadd
Had to buy an IPv4 address for a VPS the other day in order to clone some git repositories. Couldn't believe it. Costing their customers money when they should be able to support v6 by now.
hk1337
What VPS are you using that doesn't come with both IPv4 and IPv6?
geoffeg
I thought a recent downtime was contributed to rolling out the initial prep for IPv6 support.
jiggawatts
Azure has “support” for IPv6 that just “works”, so… they could just turn it on.
Oh, you’re wondering about the air quotes?
Don’t worry about it! Sales told my boss that that feature checkbox has a “tick”.
depr
Given that they are probably at least partly on Azure, this makes it less surprising because Azure has the worst IPv6 implementation of the 3 large cloud providers.
77pt77
Possibly stupid question but, how can someone mess that up?
What is wrong/missing?
jiggawatts
I’ve gone on long rants about it before right here on HN but I can’t be bothered digging up the old post…
… the quick and dirty bullet points are:
- Enabling IPv6 in one virtual network could break managed PaaS services in other peered networks.
- Up until very recently none of the PaaS services could be configured with IPv6 firewall rules.
- Most core managed network components were IPv4 only. Firewalls, gateways, VPNs, etc… support is still spotty.
- They NAT IPv6 which is just gibbering eldrich madness.
- IPv6 addresses are handed out in tiny pools of 16 addresses at a time. No, not a /16 or anything like that.
Etc…
The IPv6 networking in Azure feels like it was implemented by offshore contractors that did as they were told and never stopped to think if any of it made sense.
References:
- Inbound IPv6 support for App Service was added this week. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/updates/?id=499998
- Outbound IPv6 support is "Preview": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview...
- Public IP Prefixes support a maximum of 16 consecutive addresses even for IPv6: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ip-s...
- There's an entire page of IPv6 limitations. To understand how nuts this is, just swap IPv6<->IPv4 and see if it still reads like a professional service you'd pay money for! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ip-s...
- You STILL can't use PostgreSQL with IPv6: "Even if the subnet for the Postgres Flexible Server doesn't have any IPv6 addresses assigned, it cannot be deployed if there are IPv6 addresses in the VNet." -- that's just bonkers.
- Just... oh my god:
"Azure Virtual WAN currently supports IPv4 traffic only."
"Azure Route Server currently supports IPv4 traffic only."
"Azure Firewall doesn't currently support IPv6"
"You can't add IPv6 ranges to a virtual network that has existing resource in use."
gmerc
Is this a good time to mention forgejo as a self hosted alternative?
yogsototh
I host a forgejo instance and I feel it is great to embrace the distributed nature of git.
But be aware if you intend to host it you will need to protect it from recent AI web scrapers. I use anubis but there are other alternatives.
jeltz
How does it compare to Gitlab?
dzogchen
Much simpler. Much less features. Completely open source and not only the core.
jeltz
Any important feature from Gitlab you feel is missing? I personally think Gitlab has way more features than I need but maybe there are some important ones I would miss.
homebrewer
Depends on your needs. Last time I checked, Gitlab wanted money for e.g. assigning multiple PR reviewers, which is available in gitea/forgejo.
The real issue with gitea/forgejo compared to Gitlab is their terrible CI, which is (to some approximation) a clone of GitHub Actions, also a dumpster fire for those of us proficient with/preferring the UNIX command line. You'll probably need a separate CI runner, like Woodpecker or Drone.
numbsafari
It's a great time.
yabones
The only thing worse than "it's down" is hearing "it's down again"
Godspeed, IR workers...
jeltz
Last time it was down was Friday last week when they broke some of the raw content URLs.
gdcbe
Maybe they should focus less on "agentic" and more on just keeping their core product solid... I suppose that doesn't rhyme with growth at all cost... zzz sad... it is
taude
git was designed as a distributed vcs for high-latency connected developers with plenty of ability to work offline.
I don't think I've really been impacted by any of the outages. Maybe I wait an extra hour to merge a feature or something, in which case I actually get to eat lunch and browse HN, doesn't feel quite as catastrophic for me, as some of you.
petcat
The problem is that people design their entire development and release lifecyle to be dependent on Github. A lot of times they can't even push code hotfixes to production without it. It's a terrible SPOF for a lot of engineering orgs.
lucb1e
We also started having customers since a few years that declare GitHub fully trusted, as in, it is simply not worth considering what the impact would be if that vendor gets compromised. I can't name names, but this includes a vendor that aims to prevent supply chain attacks (technically language-agnostic; in practice aiming to be the solution chosen by one of the biggest programming language's package manager)
> can't even push code hotfixes to production without it. It's a terrible SPOF
GitHub's availability impact is the least of my concerns these days. It'll be a really tough year for society worldwide if we need to rebuild loads of infrastructure after some threat actor got into github and managed to change key pieces of code without being detected a couple of years. Having seen how hospitals handle updates, they might get lucky and be old enough to not be affected yet, or have a really tough time recovering due to understaffed IT
No clue how to even begin solving this since our OSes are likely all pulling dependencies from GitHub without verification of the developer's PGP key, if the project even has that and applies it correctly. I guess I can only recommend being aware of the problem and doing what you can in your own organization to reduce the impact
taude
The hotfixes makes sense.
dymk
GitHub is everything in addition to the git hosting. Issue tracking, code review, CI, artifact hosting, wiki+docs, kanban board.
taude
That makes sense, I wasn't sure how "all in" everyone is on these other features that are only github centric.
koiueo
GitHub isn't just git, it's also a CI, a project management tool/issues tracker...
Joe_Cool
It also has pretty neat support for emailing patches. And it's practically impossible to lose data as long as any single dev still has an intact .git directory.
Nobody is preventing the devs from just setting up a second "upstream" and pushing to both github and gitlab (for example) or any other service at the same time.
Thev00d00
Vibe coded a bit too hard.
halfmatthalfcat
Github reliability has been abysmal the past couple of weeks.
zanfr
well I wish nothing but the best for the great people at Microsoft, this small family business.
sigio
Just completed one or our (quarterly) github exports before this hit... If people are looking into extracting everything from their organisations, i've published the scripts I use: https://github.com/sigio/github-export
bob1029
I've been working on a self-hosted alternative to GitHub and I am curious what HN finds to be the most important features. I think Code, Issues and PRs are the critical aspects, but I don't know what typical workflows look like for others these days.
It seems like there are some teams that have figured out a way to turn GH into a labyrinth of CI/CD actions that allegedly produces a ton of business value, but I don't know how typical this kind of use case is. If the average GH user just needs the essentials, I could easily focus those verticals down and spend more time on things like SAML/OIDC, reporting APIs, performance, etc. I suspect there aren't a whole lot of developers who are finding things like first party AI integration to be indispensable.
gazook89
Any time I see this topic brought up, two things are always mentioned: the "hub" part, meaning the discoverability and social aspect, and the "network effect" of having everyone use a single service (so everyone already has an account and they don't have to create additional account for every self-hosted project.
tracker1
Agreed, it's definitely the network cohesion that keeps GH together. Especially for FLOSS. For advanced features, there are some niceties that say Azure DevOps offers that GH Enterprise still lacks, though it feels like there's some convergence on the backend.
I like GH Actions myself, though sometimes it can get a little cumbersome with self-hosted workers on private/enterprise projects. I'm a big fan of automation and like to keep related bits closer together. As opposed to alternatives that have completely detached workflows/deployments.
justinrubek
I don't think it's the features that are lacking from the alternatives. It's the network effects.
iN7h33nD
Have you seen: https://forgejo.org/
neilv
I like what I've used of Forgejo (Git, Issues+Board, Wiki), and have hosted it on servers and localhost easily. I haven't tried its CI features yet.
Codeberg is a cloud site for open source projects that runs Forgejo.
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which is another option, especially if you want commercial support, but I haven't tried it yet.
I also kinda like GitLab, both the cloud one and the enterprise on-prem version. And their issue label features work more easily with the board than Forgejo's (automatically moving issues between columns based on scoped labels). Though their pricing tiers have been unfortunate at times (I don't know latest).
sneak
I use and love Gitea. Why not contribute to that or the other fork vs making another?
Enterprise customers, remember to email your sales rep and ask for them to report on their contracted uptime with you that you are allowed to do as per contract. They wont do this unless you ask hoping you don't notice the outages. It creates lots of internal pain - they have no automation internally for reporting on this.
This is the only way anything will ever change. GitHub is _easily_ the most unreliable SaaS product. There's not a week whereby we aren't affected by an outage. Their reputation is mud.