Discussion
GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability
Eikon: As of recently (workflows worked for months) I even have part of my CI on actions that fails with [0] 2026-02-27T10:11:51.1425380Z ##[error]The runner has received a shutdown signal. This can happen when the runner service is stopped, or a manually started runner is canceled. 2026-02-27T10:11:56.2331271Z ##[error]The operation was canceled. 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 begin 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...
embedding-shape: From GitHub CTO in 2025 when they announced they're moving everything to Azure instead of letting GitHub's infrastructure remain independent:> For us, availability is job #1, and this migration ensures GitHub remains the fast, reliable platform developers depend onThat 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.
pilif: see also: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...A migration like this is a monumental undertaking to the level of where the only sensible way to do a migration like this is probably to not do it. I fully expect even worse reliability over the next few years before it'll get better.
_pdp_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47315878
_heimdall: I'm surprised GitHub got by acting fairly independently inside Microsoft for so long. I'm also surprised GitHub employees expected that to lastThe 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.
eterm: 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.
MoreQARespect: 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.
awestroke: Perhaps when they switch over fully to Azure they'll forget to disable IPv6 access. One can dream
cedws: While GitHub obsess over shoving AI into everything, the rest of the platform is genuinely crumbling and its security holes 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.
_heimdall: 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.
yurii_l: Maybe they need to improve release strategy with Copilot AI Review =)
pluc: I'm amazed Microslop let us keep GitHub this long. Probably because they're training AI on it? To have a direct line to developers? I don't see why else they would've bothered with something that was so anti everything they stood for
__alexs: GitHub have not really got much better at adding new features either though :(
PxldLtd: 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.
kgwxd: Just use git, problem solved.
MoreQARespect: 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, this...
amelius: It's time to look for a decentralized Non-Hub alternative.
AlienRobot: Github without hub? I don't think that exists.
a-french-anon: 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.
William_BB: To me, Github has always seemed well positioned to be a one-stop solution for software development: code, CI/CD, documentation, ticket tracking, project management etc. Could anyone explain where they failed? I keep hearing that Github is terrible
conartist6: 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.
embedding-shape: 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 :)
ankit7000: "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."
pscanf: 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/
ajhenrydev: 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
esafak: They got acquired by Microsoft. Are you new to the industry?
anonym29: Owned by companies that do not help the US Federal Government illegally spy on their own citizens and murder children overseas:GitlabBitbucketSourceforgeForgejoCodebergRadicleLaunchpadOwned by companies that do help the US Federal Government illegally spy on their own citizens and murder children overseas:Github
ljm: 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.
Hasnep: 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...
Alifatisk: Have anyone checked out the status page? It's actually way worse than I thought, I believe this is the first time I am actually witnessing a status page with truly horrible results.https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses
Anon1096: 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.
neonihil: Nothing unexpected. Microsoft has a remarkable talent for turning good products into useless ones. Skype is another good showcase of such talent.
throw10920: 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.
cl0ckt0wer: Cheap, fast, and good. I see which two they chose.
bengale: Two?
CodingJeebus: Did react render better than turbo or the opposite? I assume a well-optimized turbo page would perform better
ajhenrydev: React destroyed perf and used more resources than turbo
bigDinosaur: Email?
e-dant: 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.
phyzome: 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.
b00ty4breakfast: Until paying customers start leaving en masse, they will continue to shovel out subpar service.
bitmasher9: 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.
