Even that doesn’t really make sense to me, unless they’ve done it in a way where everything has to move at once.

Everywhere I’ve worked, if a migration is causing this much downtime then you kill the migration or slow it down. If every change has a 10% chance of bringing the site down, you only do a change every week or two until you can work out the kinks.

also it should be noted that LinkedIn had a 5 year plan of migrating everything to azure but abandoned it after a year.

Here are some relevant excerpts from an October 2025 article[1]:

> In a message to GitHub’s staff, CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data center. “It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot, which are changing how people use GitHub,” he writes.

> The plan, he writes, is for GitHub to completely move out of its own data centers in 24 months. “This means we have 18 months to execute (with a 6 month buffer),” Fedorov’s memo says. He acknowledges that since any migration of this scope will have to run in parallel on both the new and old infrastructure for at least six months, the team realistically needs to get this work done in the next 12 months.

If you consider that six month parallel window to have started from the time of the October memo (written presumably at the start of October), then that puts us currently or past the point where they would have cut off their old DC and defaulted to Azure only.

Whether plans or timelines changed, I have no idea of course but the above does make for a convenient timeline that would explain the recent instability. Of course, it could also just be symptomatic of increased AI usage generally and the same problems might have surfaced at a software level regardless of whether they were in a DC or on Azure.

Putting that nuance aside, personally I like the idea that Azure is simply a giant pile of shit operated by a corporation with no taste.

[1]: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

yeah currently working with Azure. what a PITA.

I wonder if the extended downtime is just due to the on-call engineers waiting for their azure auth tokens to refresh within azure's own damn network.

i heard that they asked LinkedIn to do this too and they either refused or their systems were too complex so they refused to. Maybe that explains why LI availability seems ok

Azure, the color of BSOD

they're not just migrating to Azure, they're vibrating to Azure!

That’s not for to … SAP.

One example is the search being broken for CI logs. It takes over your browser's search hotkey too. What happens is every stage of the log is collapsed so the search doesn't work until you trigger the expansion but if you attempt to search before expanding the search will never work after it's been initialized. It's pretty infuriating when you're trying to find something in a giant build log.

Productivity is finite. If you pivot entirely to the AI stack, you're going to lose bandwidth for everything else. It's an opportunity cost problem.

Its had its fair share of outages and outrageous changes that overreach the bounds as well. Its more stable than github is but its had at least 2 sessions of downtime this year that I recall and they were both quite long (day length).

They'd lose a whole lot of users if they killed Java edition, since the modded community is so large. They'd quickly find one of the Minecraft clones reaching feature parity. And there's no good reason for it - it's not like Java is a threat anymore.

If I remember correctly UK players can no longer chat at all until they verify their ID.

Minecraft is a trick up their sleeve yet to be used. Manipulate and indoctrinate the youth.

I don't remember that happening so much (if ever) in, say, 2016. But the frequency of noticeable incidents seemingly has been rising steadily since around 2023. The Azure migration apparently only exacerbated it.

And a ton of the top end ruby staff have left. Many of them ended up at shopify. There is a growing about of non ruby/rails code at github, but most of the system that people think of when they think github are ruby/rails.

Who was also the last CEO, right? Is this a coincidence?

MSFT acquired Skype in 2011, so I would say only a few months:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s...

The best stretch Github ever had was post-acquisition when Nat Friedman as CEO.

Just wait until github comes up with an outage tuesday.

Technucally a set is a subset of itself.

It hosts all the repositories backing applycreatures, we ran dozens of git projects on the same instance, have teams, you guys did a phenomenal work. I would say it's even easy to customise.

https://foja.applycreatures.com

Edit: it has a wonderful API so I posted the link it may tempt some to ditch MS/Azure hub.

Not that I remember. VS Code was a surprising turnabout for a company that was both adamantly closed and threw FUD around like monkeys in a zoo.

> I once worked at a place with more micro services than engineers.

Currently consulting somwhere with 30 services per engineer. I cannot convince them this is hell. Maybe that makes it my personal hell.

We pride ourself on 9 5s!

seven nines? That's nothing , bro we got twelve eights!

Unironically, I think 9% uptime would be "one-tenth of a nine".

90% would be one 9 following the sequence back.

99.99

99.90

99.00

90.00

Yeah, I think especially Git mirrors can go a long too for maintaining availability and also for reducing load off main infra.

Perhaps even AIslopalypse.

Weird Al needs to capitalize on this whole AI/Al thing

Perhaps staff cuts having longtails? https://www.itpro.com/software/microsoft/microsoft-layoffs-h...

> Azure

To explain this one-word comment for those unfamiliar, see previously:

GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development (5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173

In particular:

> GitHub has recently seen more outages, in part because its central data center in Virginia is indeed resource-constrained and running into scaling issues. AI agents are part of the problem here. But it’s our understanding that some GitHub employees are concerned about this migration because GitHub’s MySQL clusters, which form the backbone of the service and run on bare metal servers, won’t easily make the move to Azure and lead to even more outages going forward.

You never go full Azure

> Any massive infra migration is going to cause issues.

What? No, no it's not. The entire discipline of Infrastructure and Systems engineering are dedicated to doing these sorts of things. There are well-worn paths to making stable changes. I've done a dozen massive infrastructure migrations, some at companies bigger than Github, and I've never once come close to this sort of instability.

This is a botched infrastructure migration, onto a frankly inferior platform, not something that just happens to everyone.

As do I. Mine is even earlier as well!

Front door did have a major outage last year.

> consider showing us

Gaze upon the tapestry in which github paints it's failure with a thin copper red thread:

https://www.githubstatus.com/

@KaiserPro has pasted the link to someone else's heatmap, which is really good. Mine was just an Excel spreadsheet with a graph that I'd intended to write a blog about but then got demotivated on because I was too busy with other things and I saw that heatmap as well. Maybe I will do a proper write up next time GitHub has an outage and I'm blocked by it.