RO system is generally probably easier to keep up than a RW system that is constantly innovating.

> Google homepage is basically never down.

The complexity difference between the Google search "app" (not counting the vast indexing infrastructure) and GitHub is also vastly different.

> AWS is basically never down.

Lol what? Have you used AWS?

> WhatsApp is basically never down.

Makes sense, Whatsapp always had a huge focus on reliable infrastructure, since day 0. Pays off I guess :)

Great question: Google's homepage revenue is directly 1:1 matches to its uptime. Its user retention is also loosely tied to its uptime, as the value is mostly a replaceable commodity (is Bing worse? sure, but it has results). This leads to the organization investing huge amounts of time and money in ensuring its uptime. I can recall a single outage in the past several years.

On the other hand, GitHub's revenue is mostly monthly/annual licensing and their have great stickiness as it's not trivial to migrate to an equivalent service provider (excluding minor projects who only use a couple of features). They can increase profits through feature development and cost saving, a lot more than through uptime. Is there a limit to this? Of course.

Google loses money when search is down because they can not serve ads. Does Github actually lose money when they are down? I think that because everyone is on subscription they do not lose money by the second, rather instead they lose reputation and long term they could lose customers, but Github's income isn't quite as sensitive to downtime as Googles in general, thus less investment in DevOps in comparison.

I don't think GitHub's homepage has gone down at any point during this outage either.