GH issues have been so useful for the better part of a decade, that I have an empty repo called my_life just so I can make issues about things like home maintenance. In the last few months, the UI has become so slow and flaky that I don't use it for nearly as much as I used to. And when I have to for a project, it slows me down noticeably.
I thought I was alone in this, but asking around I found that this is a common frustration among developers I communicate regularly with.
I've noticed everything feeling a whole lot less snappy and responsive over the past few days - ironically I think it's because they've done a major rewrite of the frontend presumably with the aim of making it more snappy and responsive!
So perhaps it's the same problem, that's been getting more prevalent until it was noticeable by monitoring. One can hope!
I know you can sync repos, I don't think you can sync issues tho
Instead, we should dogfood the FOSS ecosystem on a platform that is FOSS itself, and run as a non-profit. Codeberg, for better or worse, is the best platform for this today.
I don't know about others but for me github is hardly a service that I'm sweating moment to moment uptime. My apps are still running and so on.
Then, the outages accelerated from there.
Hilariously, after 15 years working in self hosted bitbucket systems, YES entirely.
An underfunded university with an incompetent but doing their best IT department? Zero downtime.
A mid sized company full of overly confident and "just build it" nerds building fragile shit? Zero downtime.
A large corporation with a completely outsourced IT department that can't give you access to something unless you do exactly the right undocumented thing in our internal ticketing software? Zero downtime.
That includes self hosted jenkins and literally homebuilt infrastructure with zero documentation and the guy that built it left a while ago.
I have never been able to blame our build and code infra for lack of productivity.
It's no surprise we're now feeling those effects but damn, GitHub and other services like Slack have been really bad lately.
Most outages are caused not by stuff just randomly breaking, but updates/upgrades going wrong. If you try to increase the output of new features/changes to a platform, you're bound to have more outages and downtime if you aren't more careful than before.
Microsoft, who never really excelled at engineering, to the surprise of absolutely everyone, choose adding features over stability and since years back, we're seeing the consequences of that choice.
GitHub laid off 10% of their staff in 2023 and like you say, won't have slowed down to account for that.
Ignoring all that though... other than Copilot, what big feature changes have you seen in GitHub? My experience of using their product has been broadly unchanged for years.
Is this true beyond github and slack? Both were acquired btw, that could explain their availability issues (just like twitter, now X).
What about e.g. AWS or GCP? Has their availability meaningfully reduced?
But for SaaS in general I think the trend is noticeable? Twitter led the way with massive layoffs in engineering often in the roles around reliability. The industry as a whole have aimed to cut costs however possible, and reliability/ops is usually seen as a cost-centre that gets hit hard.
I've watched this in my own space (start/scale-ups and larger companies, I work in incident response tooling) as people start talking very differently about reliability and engineering investment. You hear "do more with less" about five times every day and spend that was previously greenlit by default around reliability/redundancy is under much more scrutiny now.
I see this as a silent mirror of the reduction in open-source efforts from companies now there's been a refocus on business impact and bottom-line.
Maybe it’s time to learn their CLI (and then patiently wait for work to switch to another git service).
At one point all git operations were down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42691184
As usual that will be fixed within the 10 to 600 mins.
