Which certainly made me shit myself, briefly.
Proudly self-hosting Forgejo since then.
It would be a pain as I'd have to set up a few integrations again, but github is far lower down the risk scale than the vast majority of SAAS providers
It's a few hours worth of work. Basic git operations and pull requests works fine for us already.
The interesting part will be how much maintenance this will need, and not the least how hard it'll be to port over github actions. We have trivial workflows, but I suspect this conversion will be the painful part.
Is it true that official service status pages are updated automatically?
If the first they hear of an outage is when user requests start to fail, then that's a failure in their monitoring as well.
But effective monitoring is harder than people assume.
Maybe the Github Actions infrastructure isn't run like that.
edit: my oncall rotation notified on all 500s, 24/7, not just rates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279262
No, it's not. Official updates = potential SLA penalties. Always requires approval.
There's a threshold. It shows only once 1000 users complain.
/i
Can you sue companies for inducing such anxiety?
but I suppose that there might be some terms of conditions within using github (ahem Microsoft) that you can probably not sue them for something like this.
It really depends upon the severity of situation (imo)
For example, if a person had any heart condition and they got so stressed because of an error at github (which to be fair, I can understand the stress part, imagine losing some part of your software because it was on github and the amount of direct damage to livelihood if your income depended on it)
and I think that the judge might have to be in just the right technical know-spot as well and someone who can understand the situation from programmer's perspective hopefully.
Then I can see a case being made.
once again not a lawyer but an interesting question, would love reading other replies to your comment.
also for what its worth, you can sue any company for X,Y or Z. The question worth asking is if you can win such lawsuit.
Personally I believe it might be hard but not impossible but for all practical use cases it might as well be but the only answer can probably be found in court. I am just guessing at this point.
We can't be blocked here. Seems silly what we settled on this, but for a long time GitHub had been reliable enough for many years, but things are sliding down the pan as of late.
Been burned too many times on that one.
Move to EC2.
Darn AWS is down.
Alright, run it on a Mac Mini in your basement. Ahh dawn, your ISP is having issues. Good thing you have a backup 5G hotspot.
Ohh no, the power is out.
Eventually you have to trust someone else.
GitHub is a tragedy of the Commons. Too many people are using it, and Microsoft isn't willing to handle it correctly.
Feels like a very good business opportunity. Minimum 50k yearly contracts, GitHub with actual uptime. GitPro ?
Aggregate risk is too high.
On my repo the jobs do not get scheduled on the PRs at all, so I assume that separation wouldn't help for todays issue.
Wait until you charge you for self-hosting runners.
Oh wait. They already tried.
You can now hire me as an overpriced consultant instead of paying Microsoft.
I don't think vibecoding at Github has much to do with it.
That makes sense. Thank you!
That being said there was a noticeable trend starting around 2022.[2] That being said they’ve also been doing a big migration to Azure. It’s likely a combination of things.
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
We're now considering Buildkite (apparently they have a GH actions migration tool) or self hosting something (GitLab CI, maybe even Jenkins), as it looks like that would've kept ticking over since we're still seeing webhooks being triggered today during the downtime.
I used to use Cirrus CI as an alternative to GitHub Actions and am looking for a new alternative. I wonder if Depot could fit in the same way for my needs. I need to run builds and tests in Windows, Linux and macOS.
Hope you don't mind the public ask, it seems useful for others.
If we're using depot runners, and want to use them directly, or move off of github actions being the controller for when things run: what do you suggest?
Trigger the workflows directly on depot via CLI?
We’d need more details around what you’re seeing. It is true that if auth across GitHub is broken than we can’t copy your actions out to be used by Depot CI. However, we have a solution in the works for that as well.
In short, Depot CI, our own engine and control plane is not dependent on upstream actions control plane. But still has to listen for commit events to know if/when to run jobs on things like PRs. This to is being removed in the future.
https://www.blacksmith.sh/ and https://runs-on.com/
They also say that they're much cheaper than github
I vibe coded a script that interacts with both Gitlab and Github via their APIs and I've been using it pretty heavily since this morning. I crossed the streams! Goodness, I didn't know it would be _this_ bad!
- So many super-heroes/super-villains
spooky action at a distance
... You're off the hook this time./s
No, it's not like "act," because it uses the standard Github runner, the difference is that the control plane is an emulation of api.github.com, because of this we can do all kinds of nice things:
Caching in ~0 ms. Pause on failure, so you can let your AI agent fix it and retry without pushing.
Is what it boils down to.
> codex "Fix this pipeline, use `act` to verify your changes"
I have tried to use act many times, and many times I've failed.
P.S. pause on failure is also helpful for humans, but I'm trying to be realistic about where the future of programming is going...
I like that it exists, but what a freaking mess that it's necessary and so difficult to do.
I started playing with proxmox VMs and containers in them (docker and tart) to see if I can build some local infrastructure to properly solve this…
The jobs runs via containers.
For instance, the UI at setups such as https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng is quite ok-ish, in my opinion. Granted, it is mostly copy/paste from github but that still is about 1000000x better than sourceforge's interface - and gitlab's UI too (I just hate gitlab's UI, they seem to love complexity and a billion features only 0.000001% ever need; GitHub, with all its faults, is for the most part really simple - not everywhere, e. g. GitHub wiki setup sucks, but by and large I think it is simple overall).
EDIT: sorry i meant this rant at the one complaining for the free service not for the paid customers (which is unacceptable)
It is relatively easy to scale a collection of simple things to extreme and exhibit complex behavior together. It is a lot harder to scale something complex to extreme. But too many times the latter is the default - designed wrong from the ground up and stuck in scaling hell.
If Google owned GitHub would they be better positioned to scale?
I don't want to delve into it any further - but something about it seems incongruous. It's not spam it's submarine marketing.
Apologies for the spam!
The latest language models have enabled this sort of thing for me. I can integrate a mini Jenkins into every project within a 5-10 minute prompting session. This sort of code isn't hard. It's just tedious, and the LLMs absolutely rock at boring repetitive stuff. Having a win32 service start up successfully on the very first try is something I haven't experienced until 2026.
I agree in a hosted+shared SQL scenario you have to be a little bit more careful with all of this. Arguably, you should have a separate schema management phase in these cases.
But if you are just SQLite embedded in the service, you can use the user_version pragma to track schema version and perform deterministic migrations (assuming a user didn't manually jack with the file in-between).
"Update something in the cloud" <- What do you mean?
Jesus, that's both horrible and seems within reach.
From their FAQs[0]:
> Codeberg's mission is to promote free/libre software. Keeping software private is obviously not our primary use case, but we acknowledge that private repositories are useful or necessary at times.
GitHub was, once upon a time, quite stable. Things have changed: more features, more usage, and automated agents.
"Well. It's got a nine in it"
"What percentage??"
"Nine"
https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1toa9tf/mode...
So why are Actions so unreliable anyway? Occam's Razor would probably suggest the domain is inherently complex/difficult; but other providers show that reliability is possible. What would Occam's Razor suggest next? Poor management..?
source: voices in my head. Not affiliated with MSFT.. anymore.
Anyway. Forgejo's response to it: https://floss.social/@forgejo/116494295922963052
(Ofc, in a sensible universe, we just brush that off to a JS/Firefox glitch or my ISP.)
And yet, here I am. My code is not compiling, my AI isn't vibing, nonetheless I can't work! Two more hours before I can get off!
For Git, all you technically need is ssh access and some backup strategy for your server. It would be bare bones but workable. And there are of course plenty of OSS things that are a lot nicer than that.
I'm still using gh and gh actions and we are mostly below the freemium layer with that. But it is kind of slow and honestly a dedicated vm plus some high CPU/memory workers we can spin up on a need to have basis might be a lot faster. With GH outages becoming more common, my hand might be forced a bit.
In recent weeks, I've spun up listmonk (mailing list solution), matrix (as a slack alternative), and a few other things specific to our software stack. A github alternative would be more of the same. We don't need a lot.
The main objection is that with more moving parts to worry about, the workload for me also increases. Things need updating, monitoring, backups, alerting (and responding to alerts), etc. That sucks up my time and that is scarce.
Another reason for self hosting these days is that with agentic AI tools, self hosted things are a lot easier to integrate into agentic systems. If it is self hosted, you don't have to worry about API limitations, rate limitations, walled gardens, etc. All the traditional SAAS silos are becoming a problem from that point of view. The more locked down it is, the bigger the motive for moving away from it. That's why we ditched Slack for Matrix. Slack is hopelessly locked down and tedious to deal with. Matrix is super easy for this.
Technically Dropbox is just rsync.
Also https://xkcd.com/1319/ but for maintenance.
Perhaps not 100% physically shared infra but there's references of architecture overlap such as "The GitHub-hosted runner application is a fork of the Azure Pipelines Agent."
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/concepts/runners/github-h...
https://github.com/actions/runner-images#about
A few threads where blips have affected both services.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781922
Something’s wrong when my own infrastructure is more reliable than Microsoft’s.
This is why we don't use Github Actions, kids.
Seriously, its a proprietary build service that puts the keys to the kingdom in someone elses' control. Just: No!
Print this status page to PDF so you've got it handy next time someone castigates you for not using Github Actions, folks.
I am trying to refrain my "off topic" rants... but such microsoft github abuse is generating so much hate due to their dominant market position, it is hard.
Even though it's selfhosted and we don't have a dedicated infrastructure team, I don't remember it ever being down in the last 12 years I have been working here.
Reminds me of the occasional “JavaScript developer tries to vibe debug a Linux kernel issue” comments we get here.
I like being able to vote with my (teams) wallet and I'm tired of staying out of convenience
This is a conservative estimate assuming linear growth, the actual number is likely going to be higher. Much higher.
It's not too hard to grow 14X YoY if you start from a hundred customers. If you have hundreds of millions? Yeah, not so easy.
Or maybe it's before the GitHub internal devs are online and deploying changes.
I much prefer Woodpecker CI, which is an open source fork of Drone.io. It supports multiple Git backends like GitHub, Gitea, Forgejo, Gitlab, Bitbucket. It supports running jobs locally, on Docker, and on Kubernetes. And there's autoscalers built in for AWS, Hetzner, Linode, Vultr, and Scaleway. There's a bunch of 3rd party plugins (https://woodpecker-ci.org/plugins) for custom integrations. The UX is also very simple, with OAuth used not only for authentication/authorization but also setting up & accessing repos. The system architecture is great, with separate components that run stateless connected to a database, and a custom plugin is any program that takes environment variables and does stdio. The config file is a good balance of ugly YAML and convenience syntax like shell-style parameter expansion variables.
It probably takes less than 15 minutes to install, set up, and run WoodpeckerCI for a small team, so it's not a big investment to try out or host. With the autoscaling plugins it lets you scale your workload up to whatever size. Honestly you could run it on a laptop since it's written Go.
(to clarify for beginners: the config file docs are found in a section called "workflow syntax" (https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/usage/workflow-syntax) and variable parameter expansion is buried deep in an environment variables page called "string operations" (https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/usage/environment#string-oper...). poorly organized docs aside, the system itself works well)
We have already seen this in the last some weeks, but now this has become a meme that keeps on giving. GitHub down! GitHub up again. GitHub Down! GitHub ... ...
- GitHub
- Hiring budgets
- RAM (/personal computing in general)
- Electricity
- Media/Content
- Truth
Setting it all up would have been tediously annoying eight months ago (Buildkite requires setting up GitHub webhooks for each repo).
Last week I just had codex set up everything, ephemeral vm runners and all, using a couple of low-spec refurb mac minis, Buildkite’s API, a short-lived API token, and migrate my repositories one by one.
So far so good, it’ll pay for itself within two to three months, and following today’s outage I suggested at work that we experiment with the same set up.
They’re considering it.
"Microsoft’s GitHub was positioned to win the AI coding race. Outages got in the way" - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-was-positioned-to-...
Technically this one was earlier but the other one has more traction.
Self hosted Gitlab with self hosted (or AWS) runners running your pipelines.. We only use Github as a mirror for our public repositories.
Thanks for pointing out that nobody is using that thing
This time today it was caused by friendly fire by the automatic suspension of the GitHub Actions bot which is now a "Ghost" user. Since there is no CEO of GitHub to contact it we are just going to see more [1] of this again.
You might need to push a critical change soon, but now you cannot. You won't get any of these issues if you self hosted as I said 6 years ago...[2]
[0] https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/g6ffrm0rfvz9
The open source contribution model as we once knew it is dead; you're not going to accept patches from random agents. The risk is way too high. And you can see that increasingly "AI Slop" makes it difficult to be a maintainer of any semblance of a popular repo.
So what's the value? A durable place to store work? hah.
Discovery? That part of Github has always been shitty.
So that leaves.. Github Actions? The thing that is down every other day and has been the subject of a few ~rug pulls~/attempted price hikes that are almost surely coming back?
Perfect timing that we post https://www.jxd.dev/writing/building-plain just as this latest incident started.
I've done some hacky shit in CI scripts, but none made me more mad than that one.
With all the recent negativity – how are they not even TRYING to fix the damn thing?
I'm guessing related to this? The blog post is dated 11 days ago but I just noticed a blue banner on my actions page today.
