43 minutes ago
Is the pre-2018 data actually accurate? There seem to have been a number of outages before then: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&...
Maybe that's just the date when they started tracking uptime using this sytem?
16 minutes ago
Data comes from the official status page. It may be more a marketing/communication page than an observability page (especially before selling)
an hour ago
Even better IMO is this status page: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
"The Missing GitHub Status Page" with overall aggregate percentages. Currently at 90.84% over the last 90 days. It was at 90.00% a couple days ago.
43 minutes ago
It has been pretty rough. Their own numbers report just a single `9` for Actions in Feb 2026 with 98% uptime. But that said -- I don't get the 90% number.
Anecdotally, it seems believable that 1 in 50 times (2%) in Feb that Actions barfed. Which is not very nice, but it wasn't at 1 in 10 times (10%).
32 minutes ago
It looks like the aggregate stats are more of a venn diagram than an average. So if 1/N services are down, the aggregate is considered down. I don't think this is an accurate way to calculate this. It should be weighted or in some way show partial outages. This belief is derived from the Google SRE book, in particular chapters 3 (embracing risk) and 4 (service level objectives)
a minute ago
I mean I think it's useful. It answers the question, "what percentage of the time can I rely on every part of GitHub to work correctly?". The answer seems to be roughly 90% of the time.
42 minutes ago
An aggregate number like that doesn’t seem to be a reasonable measure. Should OpenAI models being unavailable in CoPilot because OpenAI has an outage be considered GitHub “downtime”?
22 minutes ago
I think reasonable people can disagree on this.
From the point of view of an individual developer, it may be "fraction of tasks affected by downtime" - which would lie between the average and the aggregate, as many tasks use multiple (but not all) features.
But if you take the point of view of a customer, it might not matter as much 'which' part is broken. To use a bad analogy, if my car is in the shop 10% of the time, it's not much comfort if each individual component is only broken 0.1% of the time.
44 minutes ago
These are two pages telling two different things, albeit with the same stats. The information is presented by OP in a way to show the results of the Microsoft acquisition.
39 minutes ago
It’s biaised to show this without the dates at which features were introduced. A lot of the downtimes in the breakdown are GitHub Actions, which launched in August 2019; so yeah what a surprise there was no Actions downtime before because Actions didn’t exist.
an hour ago
I got Claude to make me the exact same graph a few weeks ago! I had hypothesized that we'd see a sharp drop off, instead what I found (as this project also shows) is a rather messy average trend of outages that has been going on for some time.
The graph being all nice before the Microsoft acquisition is a fun narrative, until you realize that some products (like actions, announced on October 16th, 2018) didn't exist and therefore had no outages. Easy to correct for by setting up start dates, but not done here. For the rest that did exist (API requests, Git ops, pages, etc) I figured they could just as easily be explained with GitHub improving their observability.
an hour ago
Github actions needs to go away. Git, in the linux mantra, is a tool written to do one job very well. Productizing it, bolting shit onto the sides of it, and making it more than it should be was/is a giant mistake.
The whole "just because we could doesn't mean we should" quote applies here.
36 minutes ago
But GitHub actions is not Git?
33 minutes ago
The same philosophy would suggest that running some other command immediately following a particular (successful) git command is fine; it is composing relatively simple programs into a greater system. Other than the common security pitfalls of the former, said philosophy has no issue with using (for example) Jenkins instead of Actions.
an hour ago
FWIW if people are looking for a reason why, here's why I think it's happening: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
12 minutes ago
You'd think they'd do all the testing elsewhere and use a much shorter window of time to implement Azure after testing. I don't think this fully explains over 6 years of poor uptime.
an hour ago
PR merging broken right now https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/ml7wplmxbt5l
an hour ago
I remember a lot of unicorn pages back in the days. Maybe the status page was just not updated that regularly back then?
41 minutes ago
I think the unicorn is only for web pages. Things like git api services might be broken independently (and often are!) and they might show up on the status page after some time.
an hour ago
I feel like by now GitHub has a worse downtime record than my self hosted services on my single server where I frequently experiment, stop services or reboot.
an hour ago
It's ok because we're still paying for it. QoS degradation is worth it. No need to have 99.999% then you can have 90.84% and still people to pay for it.
40 minutes ago
The biggest spikes are Github Actions, starting November 2019. They didn't go GA until November 13, 2019: https://siliconangle.com/2019/11/13/github-universe-announce...
13 minutes ago
Nearly every time Github has an outage, Azure is having issues also.
Actually the last 4-5 outages from Github, Our Azure environments have issues (that they rarely post on the status page) and lo and behold I'll notice that Github is also having the same problem.
I can only assume most of this is from the Azure migration path. Such an abysmal platform to be on. I loathe it.
Looks like there's an internal service health bulletin:
Impact Statement: Starting at 19:53 UTC on 31 Mar 2026, some customers using the Key Vault service in the East US region may experience issues accessing Key Vaults. This may directly impact performing operations on the control plane or data plane for Key Vault or for supported scenarios where Key Vault is integrated with other Azure services.
Honestly all of the key vault functions are offline for us in that region. Just another day in paradise.
an hour ago
I'm convinced one of my org's repos is just haunted now. It doesn't matter what the status page says. I'll get a unicorn about twice a day. Once you have 8000 commits, 15k issues, and two competing project boards, things seem to get pretty bad. Fresh repos run crazy fast by comparison.
an hour ago
Unsolicited feedback ... changing the y-axis to be hours (not % uptime) might be more intuitive for folks to understand.
The data is there, you just have to hover over each data point.
an hour ago
It could even be both % and offline hours per year. To me the percentage is simpler to understand.
12 minutes ago
Programming is a solved problem, btw.
an hour ago
It could also be that they have more customers / clients now, or offer more capabilities.
36 minutes ago
GitHub is 100x the size today with 100x the product surface area. Pre-Microsoft GitHub was just a git host. Now, whether GitHub should have become what it is today is a fair question but to say “GitHub” is less stable today vs. 10 years ago ignores the significant changes. Also, much of these incidents are limited to products that are unreliable by nature, e.g: CoPilot depends on OpenAI and OpenAI has outages. The entire LLM API industry expects some requests to fail.
GitHub’s reliability could stand to be improved but without narrowing down to products these sort of comparisons are meaningless.
7 minutes ago
> Pre-Microsoft GitHub was just a git host.
And even just that aspect of the service is now extremely unreliable. If outages in the LLM side can cause that to break, that would indicate some serious architectural problems.
24 minutes ago
The article provides a way to do just that - click breakdown then you can deselect any product areas.
Just the Git operations show way more instability post acquisition.
an hour ago
Do we have metrics for the uptime of other major services? Would be interesting to see if this is just a GitHub problem or industry-wide.
27 minutes ago
Bitbucket Cloud incident history: https://bitbucket.status.atlassian.com/history
Though I will be the first to say I don't fully trust it based on the flakey git clone errors we see in CI.
41 minutes ago
This at least makes me feel like I am not going crazy when I say "Github used to be much more reliable before Microsoft bought them"
an hour ago
The significance of the changeover would be much more impactful if the chart showed a longer history.
39 minutes ago
interesting to see the correlation between outages and major feature launches — the big ones almost always coincide with infrastructure changes rather than random failures. Would be curious to overlay this with GitHub's engineering blog posts about what was happening behind the scenes.
24 minutes ago
I wonder if they got moved to Azure in 2019?
24 minutes ago
I will chime in that Jira and Bitbucket have drastically improved performance and reliability over this same time period. It actually feels snappy and they seem to listen to feedback.
34 minutes ago
When I say that Microsoft writes very bad code some people get offended. For example for Azure Event Hubs they have almost no documentation and Java libraries that mostly do not run.
an hour ago
I mean I'm as annoyed as the next person about the outages but I'm not sure correlating with the Microsoft acquisition tells the whole story? GitHub usage has been growing massively I'd imagine?
33 minutes ago
hot take: I would accept ads under every PR comment in GitHub if we could get back to 3 or 4 nines of reliability.
an hour ago
I guess "centralizing everything" to GitHub was never a good idea and called it 6 years ago. [0]
Looking at this now, you might as well self host and you would still get better uptime than GitHub.
an hour ago
That's pretty stark.
15 minutes ago
Nearly all the variance is from Actions, a product that didn’t exist beforehand.
It’s despicable to see everyone punching down on GitHub. Even under Microsoft they’ve continued to provide an invaluable and free service to open source developers .
And now , while vibe coders smother them to death, we ridicule them . Shameful , really