GitHub was the pinnacle of GitForge a couple of years back, and it seems like they wanted to hit a wall.
Otherwise, you cannot explain how you can enshittify a software that much.
There are heavier solutions, but even setting something like this up as a backstop might be useful. If your blog is being hammered by ChatGPT traffic, spare a thought for Github. I can only imagine their traffic has ballooned phenomenally.
1: https://duggan.ie/posts/self-hosting-git-and-builds-without-...
Yeah. You probably do want to make sure you turn your .git/ into a "bare" git repository but that's basically it.
And it's what I do too: an OCI container that gives me access to all my private Git repos (it sets up SSH with U2F so I get to use my Yubikey to push/pull from various machines to those Git repos).
The classic "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM".
If you pick something else, and there's issue, people will complain about your choice being wrong, should have gone with the biggest player.
Even if you provide metrics showing your solution's downtime being 1% of the big player.
Something like Cloudflare is so big and ubiquitous, that, when there's a downtime, even your grandma is aware of it because they talk about it in the news. So nobody will put the blame on the person choosing Cloudflare.
Even if people decides to go back (I had a few customers asking us to migrate to other solutions or to build some kind of failover after the last Cloudflare incidents), it costs so much to find the solutions that can replace it with the same service level and to do the migration, that, in the end, they prefer to eat the cost of the downtimes.
Meanwhile, if you're a regular player in a very competitive market, yes, every downtime will result in lost income, customers leaving... which can hurt quite a lot when you don't have hundreds of thousands of customers.
GitHub is a distributed version control storage hub with additional add-on features. If peeps can’t work around a git server/hub being down and don’t know to have independent reproducible builds or integrations and aren’t using project software wildly better that GitHubs’, there are issues. And for how much money? A few hundred per dev per year? Forget total revenue, the billions, the entire thing is a pile of ‘suck it up, buttercup’ with ToS to match.
In contrast, I’ve been working for a private company selling patient-touching healthcare solutions and we all would have committed seppuku with outages like this. Yeah, zero downtime or as close to it as possible even if it means fixing MS bugs before they do. Fines, deaths, and public embarrassment were potential results of downtime.
All investments become smart or dumb depending on context. If management agrees that downtime would be lethal my prejudice would be to believe them since they know the contracts and sales perspective. If ‘they crashed that one time’ stops all sales, the 0% revenue makes being 30% faster than those astronauts irrelevant.
Of course, once you have the momentum it doesn't matter nearly as much, at least for a while. If it happens too much though, people will start looking for alternatives.
The key to remember is Momentum is hard to redirect, but with enough force (reasons), it will.
If people tolerate 10 monthly github failures, they can most likely tolerate one hypothetical hour of downtime from one physical server failure for some random Saas product you're selling to them.
And the frequency they can tolerate is surprisingly high given that we're talking about the 20th or so outage of 2026 for github. (See: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=githubstatus.com)
A self-hosted git server is trivial. Making sure everything built on top of that is able to fallback to that is not. Especially when GH has so many integrations out of the box
It can be a pain to setup a break-glass, especially if you have a lot of legacy CI cruft to deal with. But it pays off in spades during outages.
I'm biased because we (dagger.io) provide tooling that makes this break-glass setup easier, by decoupling the CI logic from CI infrastructure. But it doesn't matter what tools you use: just make sure you can run a bootstrap CI pipeline from your local machine. You'll thank me later.
We built a CI platform using dagger.io on top of GH Actions, and the "break glass" pattern was not an afterthought; it was a requirement (and one of the main reasons we chose dagger as the underlying foundation of the platform in the first place)
I did a PoC of Dagger for an integration and delivery workload and loved the local development experience. Being able to define complex pipelines as a series of composable actions in a language which can be type checked was a great experience, and assembling these into unix-style pipelines felt very natural.
I struggled to go beyond this and into an integration environment, though. Dagger's current caching implementation is very much built around there being a single long-lived node and doesn't scale out well, at least without the undocumented experimental OCI caching implementation. Are you able to share any details on how Fastly operates Dagger?
Crazy in 2026, but installable software has some pros still, for both the developer and for the customer. And I would personally love if I could do things that way for more things.
Even if I get the idea of an automation before there’s a run book for it.
I generally recommend that the break glass solution always be pair programmed.
Ironically, this makes Dagger even more relevant in the age of coding agents: the bottleneck increasingly is not the ability to generate code, but to reliably test it end-to-end. So the more we all rely on coding agents to produce code, the more we will need a deterministic testing layer we can trust. That's what Dagger aspires to be.
For reference, a few other HN threads where we discussed this:
If anyone is using Github professionally and pays for github actions or any github product, respectfully, why?
You can switch to a VPS provider and self host gitea/forejo in less time than you might think and pay a fraction of a fraction than you might pay now.
The point becomes more moot because github is used by developers and devs are so so much more likely to be able to spin up a vps and run forejo and run terminal. I don't quite understand the point.
There are ways to run github actions in forejo as well iirc even on locally hosted which uses https://github.com/nektos/act under the hood.
People, the time where you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and expected basic service and no service outage issues is over.
What you are gonna get is service outage issues and lock-ins. Also, your open source project is getting trained on by the parent company of the said git provider.
PS: But if you do end up using Gitea/forejo. Please donate to Codeberg/forejo/gitea (Gitea is a company tho whereas Codeberg is non profit). I think that donating 1k$ to Codeberg would be infinitely better than paying 10k$ or 100k$ worth to Github.
Github was super stable - then it got shitty once they switched to React on the frontend instead of the server rendered pages, then Co-pilot stuff
lately I haven't heard them bragging about the Rails Monolith
I get that new developers might be more familiar with React, but then again, as soon as the trade-offs were apparent, I would've pulled the plug.
But they said: Buckle up, everyone, let's ruin our product!
I'm getting cf-mitigated: challenge on openai API requests.
https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/ https://status.openai.com/
That being said, GitHub is Microsoft now, known for that Microsoft 360 uptime.
Actually here you go, I have pasted the matrix link to their community, hope it helps https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-space:matrix.org
I mean... It's right in the name! It's up for 360 days a year.
But the day comes that I need to tweak a deploy flow, or update our testing infra and about halfway through the task I take the whole thing down. It's gotten to the point where when there's an outage I'm the first person people ask what I'm doing...and it's pretty dang consistent....
More existential than going down a few times a week?
does anyone know where these "detailed root cause analysis" reports are shared? is there maybe an archive?
There are also monthly availability reports: https://github.blog/tag/github-availability-report/
Our health check checks against githubstatus.com to verify 'why' there may be a GHA failure and reports it, e.g.
Cannot run: repo clone failed — GitHub is reporting issues (Partial System Outage: 'Incident with Copilot and Actions'). No cached manifests available.
But, if it's not updated, we get more generic responses. Are there better ways that you all employ (other than to not use GHA, you silly haters :-))
I'm on the lookout for an alternative, this really is not acceptable.
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
Most individual services have two nines... but not all of them.
that's....gobsmacking...I knew it was memeably bad but I had no idea it was going so badly
Octocat (The OG github mascot) has a family that it goes to the park with anytime he wants.
Luckily his boss Microslop, is busy with destroying windows of his house and banning people from its discord server.
Should have self hosted.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p204nx/ac... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230704
PRs are a defacto communication and coordination bus between different code review tools, its all a mess.
LLMs make it worse because I'm pushing more code to github than ever before, and it just isn't setup to deal with this type of workload when it is working well.
Have you ever considered that this is the problem? GH never planned for this sort of pointless and unpaid activity before. Now they have a large increase (I've seen figures of 100x) in activity and they can't keep up.
It doesn't help that almost none of the added activity is actually useful; it's just thousands and thousands of clones of some other pointless product.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/using-ai-is-no-long...
https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
