I moved my company over to GH enterprise last year (from AzDO) and I'm considering moving us away to another vendor altogether as a result of the constant partial outages. Things that used to "just work" now are slow in the UI, and GH actions fail to schedule in a reasonable timeframe way more than they ever used to. I enjoy GH copilot as much as the next person, but ultimately I came to GH because I needed a git forge, and I will leave GH if the git forge doesn't work.
It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.
We are in a future that nobody wanted.
Their business is buying good products and turning them into shit, while wringing every cent they can out of the business. Always has been.
They have a grace period of about 2-4 years after acquisition where interference is minimal. Then it ramps up. How long a product can survive once the interference begins largely depends on how good senior leadership at that product company is at resisting the interference. It's a hopeless battle, the best you can do is to lose slowly.
some people wanted this future and put in untold amount of money to make it happen. Hint: one of them is a rabid Tolkien fan.
The person(s) who wanted this want Azure to get bigger and have prioritized Azure over Windows and Office, and their share price has been growing handsomely.
‘Microslop’, perhaps, but their other nickname has a $ in it for a reason.
It stings to have this happen as we're putting a lot of effort specifically into the core product, growing teams like Actions and increasing performance-focused initiatives on key areas like pull requests where we're already making solid progress[1]. Would love if you would reach out to me in DM around the perf issues you mentioned with diffs.
There's a lot of architecture, scaling, and performance work that we're prioritizing as we work to meet the growing code demand.
We're still investigating today's outage and we'll share a write up on our status page, and in our February Availability Report, with details on root cause and steps we're taking to mitigate moving forward.
I don’t think GitHub cares about reliability if it does anything less than that.
I know people have other problems with Google, but they do actually have incredibly high uptime. This policy was frequently applied to entire orgs or divisions of the company if they had one outage too many.
(See also: Windows, Internet Explorer, ActiveX, etc. for how that turned out)
It's great that you're working on improving the product, but the (maybe cynical) view that I've heard more than anything is that when faced with the choice of improving the core product that everyone wants and needs or adding functionality to the core product that no one wants or needs and which is actively making the product worse (e.g. PR slop), management is too focused on the latter.
What GitHub needs is a leader who is willing and able to say no to the forces enshittifying the product with crap like Copilot, but GitHub has become a subsidiary of Copilot instead and that doesn't bode well.
They need to start rolling back some of their most recent changes.
I mean, if they want people to start moving to self hosted GitLab, this is gonna get that ball rolling.
The new normal is too many cases. Then people act put off you complain, or act like you are expecting too much.
Lots of people are in software development, or management, who dont have the mindset and personality for it. These roles are not for everyone. But people like the $$$ and so the wrong people get involved.
I feel this is just the natural trajectory for any VC-funded "service" that isn't actually profitable at the time you adopt it. Of course it's going to change for the worse to become profitable.
it's almost as if Microsoft bought it, isn't it?
So not at all?
Disclaimer: I work in Microsoft (albeit in a quite disconnected part of it, nothing to do with GitHub or Copilot).
This has lead to 2 classes of devs at my company a) AI hesitant, who for many copilot is their only interaction, having their worst fears confirmed about how bad AI is. b) AI enthusiasts who are irritated by dealing with management that don't know the difference pushing back on their asks for access to SOTA agents.
If I were the frontier labs, and wasn't billions of dollars beholden to Microsoft, I'd cut Copilot off. It poisons the well for adoption of their other systems. I don't deal with the other copilots besides the coding agent variants but I hear similar things about the business application variants.
Microsofts AI reputation is in the toilet right now, I'm not sure if its understood how bad it really is within the org.
After using ChatGPT for the last 6 months or so, Copilot feels like a significant downgrade. On the other hand, it did easily diagnose a build failure I was having, so it’s not useless, just not as helpful.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/865689/microsoft-claude-code-a...
[0]: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
I guess 2021 is a long time ago now. How did that happen…
[0] https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/partitioning-...
Additionally, there is no CEO of GitHub this time that is going to save us here.
So as I said many years ago [0] in the long term, a better way is to self host or use alternatives such as Codeberg or GitLab which at least you can self host your own.
Surely some of your crazy kids can rummage up a CI pipeline on their laptop? 8)
Anyway, I only use GH as something to sync interesting stuff from, so it doesn't get lost.
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protoco...
I’ve only worked on a team once where we all were set up as remotes to each other and that was over a decade ago.
It kind of would be good for everyone if they did do it though. Need to get rid of this monopoly, and maybe people will discover that there are alternatives with actually good workflows out there.
My "favourite" restriction that an Azure DevOps PR description is limited to a pathetic 4000 characters.
I ended up writing a browser extension for my team to fix it, because the boss loved to indicate stuff with red/green text.
Genuinely baffling incompetence
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/aws-codecommit-returns-t...
I couldn't believe it. I actually thought the product was broken. Just from a visual perspective it looked like a student project. And then I got to _using_ the damn thing
They claim that is what they are doing right now. [1]
[1] https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
It's Microsoft. A reliable product is not a reasonable expectation.
ETA: Tangentially, private repos became free under Microsoft ownership in 2019. If they hadn't done that, they could've extracted $4 per month from every vibe coder forever(!)
IIRC they were kinda forced to make private repos free because competitors like Gitlab had it and they felt threatened.
I worked for one of Australia largest airline company, monthly meeting with Github team resumed in one word: AI
There is zero focus into the actual platform as we knew it, it is all AI, Copilot, more AI and more Copilot.
If you are expecting things to get better, I have bad news for you. Copilot is not being adopted by companies as they hoped, they are using Claude themselves. If Microsoft ever rollback, boy oh boy, things will get ugly.
* Originally it was Dev (issues)
* Then it was DevOps (runners)
* Then it was DevSecOps (SAST)
* Now it's AI DevSecOps (reviews, etc)
The problem is that each feature has been slightly more half-baked than the last one. The SecOps stuff is full of gotchas which don't exist. Troubleshooting a pipeline behaving correctly is extremely painful.
The other problem is that if you want a feature you have to upgrade the seat license for everyone :(
Enterprise helm will pay if that means no interruption, no AI being pushed everywhere. Some companies adopt GitLab because you can self host it, even the runners are self-hosted, there is no built-in runner like GitHub.
I used to like Gitlab, and I've self-hosted enterprise versions of both github and gitlab, and strongly believe migration from one of them to the other for "improved reliability" will be utterly underwhelming and pointless.
Gitlab used to be able to take the high-ground due to the open-core model, but these days I'm not even sure if that makes an appreciable difference.
The base models like GPT 4o, 4.1 don’t have a usage cap. Models like Claude Sonet, Opus, etc have a monthly limit and you can pay more to use these through Github Copilot.
At it's absolute best, everything just works silently, and you now have vendor lock-in with whichever proprietary system you chose.
Switching git hosting providers should be as easy as changing your remotes and pushing. Though now a days that requires finding solutions for the MR/PR process, and the wiki, and all the extra things your team might have grown to rely on. As always, the bundle is a trap.
My previous two startups used GitLab successfully. The smaller startup used paid-tier hosted by gitlab.com. The bigger startup (with strategic cutting-edge IP, and multinational security sensitivity) used the expensive on-prem enterprise GitLab.
(The latter startup, I spent some principal engineer political capital to move us to GitLab, after our software team was crippled by the Microsoft Azure-branded thing that non-software people had purchased by default. It helped that GitLab had a testimonial from Nvidia, since we were also in the AI hardware space.)
If you prefer to use fully open source, or have $0 budget, there's also Forgejo (forked from Gitea). I'm using it for my current one-person side-startup, and it's mostly as good as GitLab for Git, issues, boards, and wiki. The "scoped" issue labels, which I use heavily, are standard in Foregejo, but paid-tier in GitLab. I haven't yet exercised the CI features.
When I worked at the univerity we used Gitea.
Every job outside of univerity I had used Gitlab self hosted. While I don't like the UI or any aspect of Gitlab a lot, it gets the job done.
The GitHub Status Page does not visualize these very well but you can see them parsed out and aggregated here:
The down side is that the starting price is kinda high, so the math probably only works out if you also have a number of other workloads to run on the same cluster. Or if you need to run a really huge Forgejo server!
I suspect my comment history will provide the best details and overview of what we do. We'll be offering the Firecracker runner back to the Forgejo community very soon in any case.
If you're interested I'll see about getting the PR created sooner rather than later.
* Mandatory code reviews
* Merge queue (merge train)
If you don't need those it's good.
Also it's written in Ruby so if you think you'll ever want to understand or modify the code then look elsewhere (probably Forgejo).
Probably a stronger correlation to the fact that vibe-coding has resulted in millions of new repos being created, with automatic CIs being triggered by agents continuously sending PRs for those projects.
A prophecy that was predicted half a decade ago [0] which is now more important then as it is now today.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/796119/microsoft-github-azure-...
(although admittedly less load and redundancy)
For example, today, I had claude basically prune all merged branches from a repo that's had 8 years of commits in it. It found and deleted 420 branches that were merged but not deleted.
Deleting 420 branches at once is probably the kind of long tail workflow that was not worth optimizing in the past, right? But I'm sure devs are doing this sort of housekeeping often now, whereas in the past, we just never would've made the time to do so.
https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
And coincidentally, an early CircleCI engineer wrote an article about GitHub Action (TLDR: don't use GitHub Action for CI/CD!)
https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-02-05-github-act...
You should reach the same conclusion by trying to use it for this purpose, but also indeed for any purpose at all. Incidents that make you unable to deploy making all your CD efforts pointless are only the cherry on top.
"There's the company with a reputation for having great engineering practices that had 2 9s of reliability last time I checked..."
Now it's 2026, and customers are grudgingly accepting zero 9's of reliability.
I believe I have good enough control over it to fix issues that may arise. But then again, CC will probably do it faster. I will most likely not need to fix my own issues, but if needed, I think I will be able to.
"Critical" plays an important role in what you're saying. The true core of any business is something you should have good control over. You should also accept that less important parts are OK for AI to handle.
I think the non-critical part is a larger part than most people think.
We are lagging behind in understanding what AI can handle for us.
I'm an optimistic grey beard, even if the writing makes me sound like a naive youth :)
Everyday you opt in to get wrecked by Microsoft.
You all do realize you all could, for a change, learn something and never again touch anything Microsoft related?
Fool me once...
I learned that lesson in the 90s and became an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft).
People sadly shall never learn: Windows 12 is going to come out and shall suck more than any previous version of Windows except Windows 11, so they'll see it as progress. Then Windows 13 is going to be an abysmal piece of crap and people shall hang to their Windows 12, wondering how it's possible that Microsoft came out with a bad OS.
There are still people explaining, today, that Microsoft ain't all bad because Windows XP was good (for some definition of good). Windows XP came out in late 2001.
Stockholm syndrome and all that.
I wonder how much of these outages are related.
Long term impact? Leadership aint gonna stay to see that.
Anyone else having issues? It is blocking any kind of release
Do you allow me to run the following command?
cd project; find -type f | while read f; do mv "$f" /dev/null; doneHopefully it will get bad enough fast enough that they'll recognize they need to drastically change how they are operating. But I fear we're just witnessing a slow slide into complacency and settling for being a substandard product with monopoly-power name recognition.
It's just "yet another day of business as usual" as this point.
The history for today is a bit of a mess really: https://www.githubstatus.com/history