Because any price at all will immediately cause users to shift to another platform, and GitHub's value is that it is _the_ place to put your code on the internet.

The people with the spreadsheets have determined the value of this loss leader to be too enormous to shut it off.

Why not just add a rule such as: "Non paying customers can only upload X commits per day"

X doesn't even need to be that low. It could be 100 or 200. Just something that slows down the agents that spam them with commits/pushes.

It's easy from an armchair to say things like they should just get more capacity, or they should segregate free repos onto other servers. But maybe they are doing what you're thinking, and with that churn they get mistakes that cause outages, esp dealing with legacy systems. I've been there (not at GitHub or MSFT).

Microsoft executives have an incentive to pretend that AI is great and scaling it has no problems

> My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude

Seems presumptuous to assume a root case while the incident is still ongoing, no?

They also sell the machinery to produce the slop (through OpenAI at least).

If they make it harder to push slop on github, people might treat it as an incentive to generate less slop. Less tokens sold. Bad. Very bad.

The github paying customers are not going to move away.

Plus, it's probably genuinely hard to scale. And they can't throw compute at the problem - all compute is already going to the LLMs.

I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with vibe coded updates.

I have wondered the same thing. Even a small fee like $50 a year would get rid of a lot of AI slop that justs eats up resources.

I would gladly pay that fee if it means Github is reliable for paying customers.

they want that code (from private repos) to train the models

They would benefit from a HackerNews-esque karma system.

Their problem is partly scale, but also that they are making a ton of use of AI tools, which is undermining the quality of their software. The latter can't be fixed with a price increase, they need to pull their heads out of the AI groupthink for that.

>So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over?

I think it behooves them for the public presentation of their issues to too much load. If they implemented load shedding and still had issues the follow-up questions would be less comfortable.

I’m willing to give them a break as I’m assuming they have a lot of scaling problems due to the influx of LLM assisted coding.

But maybe I’m wrong?

I deployed Forgejo on my homelab yesterday. Now GitHub is just a free backup service.

I guess they're quite happy with that TBF, it doesn't seem like they're that interested in being a git forge anyway.

The Unicorn page rubbed me the wrong way. Thankfully I was able to revert changes to my prod instance using another approach. But I count on GH for reliability.

I think the same. But the GitHub CLI is the biggest block for me. It is a killer feature. No other tool is close. To self-host the forge is easy. To replace gh in my scripts and agent workflows is not.

Atleast you're getting the unicorn. I am getting 404 on valid links. For a moment I thought the repo is gone.

https://imgur.com/b0Xj3Z6

They should replace the unicorn image with a horse or at least a zebra during ongoing incidents.

That unicorn was already served in the RubyOnRails days!

People overestimate how much they care about stuff. Moving off GitHub would be more costly for us than having 5% downtime. Obviously there’s a tipping point, but it shows people are tolerant given the price tags.

If I'm running, say, an e-commerce business, an hour of downtime on my serving-path might cost me $100k of revenue. An hour of downtime for my development stack might cost me 30 person-hours = a few grand. As a result, I'm much more willing to have unreliable github than unreliable CDN/Compute/etc.

https://vimeo.com/355556831

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

That canot happen if the market becomes monopolistic, with every bigtech out there buying every startup worth a penny. The erosion of anti trust in the US created this monstrosity.

A lot of it is inertia I think. I hear people saying that they "just use so-and-so for version control" but really we all have tons of CI/CD build and test pipelines, config, business processes etc in Github (rightly or wrongly).

That number of 9s might be a thing for the lower layer cloud services like on AWS or Azure or GCP. Even then, that us-east-1 outage was an accidental power move. It established that many are best off putting all their stuff on us-east-1 cause then their outages only happen at the best possible times, whereas multi-region complexity might cause its own kind of outage when nobody else is down.

Competing services can't afford the data storage to compete with Big tech

I think AI is going to change this. Once you've built around github you feel locked in, since moving all your CI and other actions out of there, and your workflows out of there, is labor intensive. Now you could migrate from github to another service in a week, maybe less depending on how many workflows you need to move.

Github is a social network, not a cloud service.

(only 5% /s)

I was there before 2018, their reliability was never that good.

I still remember that they launched GitHub Actions in 2018 and back then I was thinking: They can't even make the website reliable, surely this will only cause them more problems.

This site's trustworthiness when it goes for pre-aquisition data was disputed here already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086786

GitHub's historical uptime page is fake, they backfilled it with 100% uptime going back to 1996: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=200

Fax. Those falling for the load/capacity excuse are gullible.

Maybe not the only problem, but that graph ends in February and it gets visibly worse starting in May: https://isgithubcooked.com/

Pretty sure this is caused by trying to move to Azure (and I'd bet like $1000 partially due to trying to move DBs to network backed disk instances)

Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.

"Protocols, not platforms" should have remained the philosophy of the Internet. Alas, we are here.

Use Tangled ! https://tangled.org/

It's a social network with github-like social features and git hosting, but you can still self host your git and have all the features like issues, PRs and so on just like GitHub.

And it's built on ATProto so you can also have your issues PRs and so on hosted on your infra, but everything interconnects nicely with your single account, just like using GitHub.

They even added a vouching system for users, to know who to trust based on who you already trusted.

At least this will wake up more people to the existing alternative efforts such as Forgejo and its progress with federation protocol.

https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...

> spread across a bunch of disparate places and services.

This is the way. Stop centralizing everything.

Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

I suppose people can use git too if they ever figure out how to send emails from a dedicated client.

Personally I don't agree at all that these centralized monoliths are a good thing.

On the contrary, I believe it's been detrimental to the open internet and only serves to control us by the powerful.

I never trusted Github and never will.

And like Twitter most people will keep using it anyway?

I think that especially when it comes to hosting, competition is good. Everything centered on github was the bad state previously. I remember people on HN claiming they wont hire someone without github account.

This splintering should happen more often.

Good. Git is a decentralized version control solution. It's built for this. The centralization around GitHub was beneficial for the initial proliferation of Git, but has long since become a net negative. The "community" you speak of was never bound to GitHub. Better alternatives have emerged and for many it's time to move to greener pastures.

It is, but a single point of failure is itself also an unstable equilibrium, given that a lot of things have to continuously go right for its continued existence in terms of governance of all kinds (technical, moderation policies, commercial/pricing etc.)

Twitter is unstable? I can't remember the last time it had an outage.

It's becoming the Microsoft Teams of Git hosting providers.

TwitHub

I think that, exactly how 95% of the people that left Twitter eventually returned, we will see a similar outflux of people from Github and the vast majority of them will quietly be back in a few months.

Fuck the community, nobody needs that, especially in a version source control system. Thinking otherwise is just dweebs' eternal longing for belonging, or someone has some bullshit to sell to the unsuspecting dirty masses.

i'm surprised the agent didn't take into consideration the http status code

> We're starting to have the conversation of "do we need to replace GitHub as our CI/CD pipeline?"

Did you have the conversation "do we need to move from $whatever CI/CD to GitHub Actions?" beforehand? What were the arguments in favour?

Self-hosted GitLab at work, self-hosted Gitea at home.

blacksmith.sh just raised tens of millions on the core premise that self-hosting CI/CD is hard [0].

they've had multiple outages in the last week, so i guess they are proving themselves correct.

in practice, giving ssh/sudo to AI (codex) and telling it to setup ephemeral self-hosted runners on your own host VM (qemu), takes about 30 minutes and works extremely well. it bangs out all the shell scripts. moved my own business over to it. zero problems.

you might even find it is kind of neat too. you can customize your VM with software pre-installed. speeds up your builds quite a bit.

[0] https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/blacksmith-seed-announcement

We use self-hosted Github runners, but it's a moot point if all of Github is mostly down as is the case right now. :\

Worth being upfront with, I'm an employee, but; Buildkite.

Frontier labs and global saas heavyweights run CI through us, plus a crop of open source tooling like Bazel, vLLM, Firecracker, Rails, Ray, Sorbet and Rust.

Shopify, Uber, Airbnb, Canva stresstested the platform ten years ago for scaling issues.

You need to take a little time to design upfront and take advantage of dynamically programmable primitives. It isn't the same ease/convenience as Actions. Bit more available though.

ultimately, folks need to stop writing massive YAML files to define their builds. CI should schedule jobs, your build system should define them. my workflow files look like this:

      steps:
          name: Do the thing
           run: nix build .#

If you're seriously looking at Gitea/Forgejo, I run Fjord, dedicated managed Forgejo, so you don't have to operate it yourself. We can help with migration and runners too. We also run a free public Forgejo instance if you just want to kick the tires first.

Self-hosted GitLab and self-hosted GitLab Runners (Omnibus Docker image)

>What's everyone else using? Self hosted Gitlab? Gitea?

Self hosted github enterprise and runners.

> What's everyone else using? Self hosted Gitlab? Gitea?

tangled.org!

It's not the most elegant thing ever, but I've been using (self-hosted) WoodpeckerCI and it's been dead simple. It doesn't have many bells and whistles, but honestly I think that's good. Forced me to put complex behavior in better systems as opposed to doing bash scripts in YAML.

If your app is not too large you can do CI/CD perfectly fine from your laptop. Put it in a docker container if you want to ensure it is perfectly reproducible. You still need Github as the origin repo to pull from, but the "git part" of GitHub seems to be (almost) always up and running. (We use "capistrano" for this)

Self hosted Gitea

Self hosted Gitlab at work with local runners

TeamCity

Have you considered Codeberg?

And then consider that GitHub hasn't had their own CEO for a year now.

GitHub simply isn't an agent code building platform. They're a RoR git host from 2008 running on an ancient MySQL setup that by some miracle continues to stay up, some of the time.

Their APIs are garbage from an agentic perspective. Try using Terraform to curate your GH org of a few hundred repos. Just running the `tf plan` will take 10min, because it's making thousands of API calls. Where's the bulk and batch APIs? No such thing. They are simply not agentic scale. Want to rerun the plan for your entire cloud vendor with thousands of VMs, IAM roles, buckets, etc... it'll run faster than checking on your repo labels.

GH needs rewritten from the ground up. The "repo is everything" arch has been creaking and falling over form many years now.

Which company is capitalizing on GitHub's lack of leadership?

Change is inevitable. Users will demand features and then you need to keep supporting them. I think GitHub's recent issues ishttps://www.birkey.co/2026-08-17-githubs-recent-crisis-has-a... more of a symptom of current AI slop than thier eng culture or structure. I put some of my thoughts here:

Code.storage is able to handle large scales too: https://code.storage/

+-------------------------+-------------------------------+

| Total storage limit | Unlimited |

| Git request rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 500+/s/repo) |

| API rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 15k+/s) |

| Max repos | Unlimited |

| Concurrent writes | 30+ |

| Repository size limit | 32TB |

| Git LFS | Supported |

| GitHub/3rd party sync | Supported |

+-------------------------+-------------------------------+

No fair! You got a runner.

I work at a startup with ~20-30 devs. We're talking about a project like this. I'm not sure weekends would work for an actual company, though maybe it depends. I think there would be an appetite for this. From my POV - the main areas of interest are how you can roll this out to a team gracefully without breaking everyone's workflows for multiple days. Good luck

Doing the same thing, and I'd join you in this consulting haha. It's a breath of fresh air to know what your CI is actually doing

Sounds interesting but I'm just going to do the same thing as you (self host).

PSA: git repo can be hosted without a "provider" and any ssh address is a valid origin url: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Setting-Up-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuIdBfjL62s

How complex is the CI migration? We’re heavily dependent on GitHub Actions and the full GitHub ecosystem by extension, but by the same token these frequent outages are destroying us.

Just going to leave this here - self hosted forgejo on fly.io with restic backups: https://forgejo-fly.fly.dev/forgejo-admin/forgejo-fly

That's an overly optimistic view of things. For a lot of us GitHub is critical infrastructure, which if it goes down loses us and our customers money.

> Github’s servers are constantly on fire as their usage increased something like 50x due to LLM sloppers pushing large amounts of trash code

I sympathized with them when they said this a handful of months ago, but then I saw this [0] page that shows how it's been shot for years prior (which tracks with my memory).

I feel for the GH engineers that have to deal with this, especially the SREs. I also don't hate the downtime right now, as I'll make a cup of coffee and do something else. I will say though, I did have a hotfix a week or so ago during the Actions outage, which really was a pain.

You're right that getting angry and ranting isn't the right reaction here, but I do no give them the LLM load excuse. I don't give them an out for having awful uptime during work hours for a product we pay quite a bit for as an org.

[0] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

For the amount of money enterprises are paying to GitHub, there is a reasonable (and contractual) expectation of uptime. I don't think my boss would find it to fun if I bailed work to hit the gym just because GitHub was down.

> Github’s servers are constantly on fire as their usage increased something like 50x due to LLM sloppers pushing large amounts of trash code

Which means they have a pricing problem. Rate limit non-paying users.

This has to be rage bait, this is a critical piece of infrastructure for many people. Stuff going down can lead to deployments failing and as you mentioned in many cases emergency hotfix's.

The idea that we should be fine with this unreliability is just amazing. It's not a mental health issue to have problems when important infra fails.

Stop blaming LLMs: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

Actually, I do have an important fix for a deal we are trying to close that does need to go out. And I am paying GitHub to host this. Once or twice, I can see, but GitHub's SLA is getting worse than just hosting it myself, and that's the entire reason I pay GitHub.

Geez, sorry that the paid service my company paid for is down and I can't do my work.

GH shouldn't have promoted LLM usage the way they have if they didn't have the infrastructure to support it. Regardless of how you feel about the code quality (which you have zero evidence of), if GH has made commitments to supporting broad LLM usage, they need to back that up with the proper hardware and without whatever fragile SDLC processes they have.

You know, I am not employed.

I have little time in my day to spend with my daughter. But I also have responsibilities. And one client has decided to bet on github. It's the only client I've ever worked with who has their code on github. EVERY other client has hosted their own gitforge or used bitbucket.

So now I am not angry because some critical piece of US-american infrastructure is down all the time.

I am angry because instead of spending time with my daughter I have to work on this later, because there are due dates and "Well, fucking GitHub was down" ain't gonna cut it.

> due to LLM sloppers pushing large amounts of trash code

Which they encouraged by pushing Copilot down everyone's throat

> To everyone who is angry: calm down. Github’s servers are constantly on fire

Is this rage bait? Isn't Google, Amazon, and all the other services in the world similarly impacted by LLM's? Isn't Claude, OpenAI, etc.? Why can they handle the load but not Github?

Allowing and accepting the LLM load is a willful choice they made and are making at the expense of their users, including their paying enterprise users.

They could easily tighten things up in that regard, and make a choice that is right for their main users at the expense of The MS corpo mandate/mission. It is a choice to do otherwise.

What if we're not angry and just perplexed? Do we calm down further or can we still ask questions?

Why do you get to tell me how I should feel?

I understand the need to level-head the discussion and calming everyone.

However, your "(you don't)" comment is not going to calm down all the people, who, you know, DO have a hotfix to push now, and DO have an angry customer that could not care less for which part of our infrastructure is breaking _their_ workflow.

The only things would calm everyone down is guarantee that Microsoft would be paying for _our_ SLA breach compensation. But they don't. And I don't think anyone is paying their GH bill with a prorata of the number of time the platform was actually available.

(I'm also aware that the wording of the contract probably clearly says that you should not use GitHub for anything critical, that Microsoft is only a small startup in their garage, that you can't credibly expect 90% uptime anyway, and that it's all the fault of LLM slop ! Bad LLM slop ! Also, please buy our LLMs to generate more slop, please.)

what if I do have an emergency hotfix for a production outage though ;-;

Hard disagree, people are paying GitHub a lot of money.

If they are facing an influx of commits from bots maybe they need to start metering commits from those accounts and charge them money.

This is a self imposed problem.

It's every other day now. We pay for a service, we expect service.

This might be naïve but wouldn't the appropriate response be to reduce access/rate limit free/new accounts in order for service to be maintained for everyone else?

> as their usage increased something like 50x due to LLM sloppers pushing large amounts of trash code

Github and their parent company are active participants in pushing LLM-driven coding.

As a _paying_ customer, I disagree.

> calm down

If people and companies are paying for critical infra they expect it to be available - it's not MY problem that their servers are on fire - last time I checked, having too much demand was a good problem to have and they've had over a year to fix it and come up with a plan.

I'm so glad I migrated to GitLab months ago.

Alternatively, don't use GH for critical infrastructure they are no longer reliable, simple as.

Well, they’re a critical piece of infrastructure with terrible stability. I’m in the process of migrating us off GitHub now.

I’m not a Meta fan but it’s interesting that they manage to keep their systems up with an order of magnitude more traffic. GitHub’s uptime is inexcusable.

While I agree in principle, Github with their CI is very critical to many parties.

> constantly on fire as their usage increased something like 50x due to LLM sloppers pushing large amounts of trash code

I find it hard to believe that github APIs don't have rate limits to handle traffic spikes.

FYI this is an argument to not use Github, not an argument to use it.

No one ever has to commit anything time sensitive.

> increased something like 50x due to LLM

This should not be an excuse since they probably can use AI to fix it /partially sarcasm

Why would you take what they say at face value? I believe that this is basically a lie covering up deeper rot.

> due to LLM sloppers pushing large amounts of trash code

hey bud your bias is showing

is the infrastructure of the free tier shared with that of paid users? That might be the issue. Otherwise if usage of paid users scales, then it would be fine.

Or, you know, it's perfectly reasonable and natural to feel angry when a service you paid for gets worse over time.

> Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t)

Oh, we do. Given the sheer number of users, it's almost guaranteed someone is on fire ever time GitHub is down. Statistics is a very charming branch of reality.

it's been trash for years, their status page just doesn't reflect that.

If we all go to the gym every time GitHub is down, we're all gonna get ripped. GitHub was down all day just last week.

They get paid millions of dollars by my company. They need to get it together.

What if you, you know, have a job?

In this case, perhaps they shouldn't allow AI slop or promote usage of AI agents...

Wouldn't be surprised if we lost free private repos because of the slopocalypse. Though most don't seem to be shy about sharing their slop with the world so I'm not sure if that will actually increase stability.

> go hit the gym or walk outside.

My mind immediately went to this classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/303/

It has nothing to do with load.

Agreed. This impatience culture is so toxic. Been down less than 30 mins.

Maybe it's this one: https://downdetector.com/status/windows-azure/

no, stop giving the AI companies free marketing

claude also had/has some issues: https://status.claude.com/incidents/zhk4v3yv1lsf

> Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales

Hard but not impossible. Being unreliable might nudge a few people. Also, Twitter had their fail whale in their early phase (mostly), not twenty years or so into their existence.

The issue with replacing Github is that it takes more than version control and issue tracking to replace the network that is Github. It's effectively the largest social network for software developers on this planet.

Tangled (tangled.org) is built on the at protocol (bluesky) and seems like an interesting take on this. Most other solutions seem to just move the problem to another much smaller silo (gitlab, codeberg, etc) or throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances.

A federated approach seems like it is directionally right. Tangled is far from feature complete but I like the direction and it probably is a bit more resilient against global outages like this. I'm not a user yet but I'm keeping an eye on it.

I'll keep my open source stuff there forever, because I like the eyeballs. But this has got to be making corporate customers flee in droves. Of course, that's exactly what GitHub _doesn't_ want.

It's a bit of a different situation though, in many cases the unit of adoption is a team or organization that is free to switch platforms without consideration of what anyone else is doing. At this point I'm going to move my personal projects, it's not bad enough to be a priority at work yet but it's trending that way.

github's value is that it has a lot of eyes and visibility for smaller projects(thought many get lost too). More and more this value is going down and that stability is getting more important. More so when the story of github these days is copilot(good or bad) and their downtime. AI is giving a lot of project owners second thoughts and being so open with an AI company too.

github replaced sourceforge, so something or things can at least offset github

Apologies if you already tried this, but I have been able to merge and get some things done via command line.

e.g.: gh pr merge 5062 -R <org/repo> --squash --delete-branch

merges work fine, the git experience as well, this is a web infra issue

Certified eleven nines SLA: 9.9999999999%

They're targeting 9 5s of uptime now. 55.5555555%.

Interestingly this dashboard says there are currently no issues.

Edit: I just realised it's hosted on gh pages and therefore probably can't be updated

That page shows today (and every day since the 14th) all green, though.

The whole point of issues is that users can create them when they don't have repo write access.

Check out Haxxy, it has a lot of fresh ideas related to issues/pr management

https://youtu.be/iBDUTaKWVdU

Undoubtedly: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22833037>

Personally, Fastcomments and all my projects can easily be switched to a self hosted provider, keeping GitHub as a read only mirror. It's probably a couple days work with today's tools.

What? No. The people that stay are the ones that don't care, that doesn't mean no one cares. That's a selection effect.

The people that care left months or years ago. I'm one of them. It was really easy, Github doesn't offer anything special.

Try and run a Pagerduty with the same level of attention to detail as Github. Far fewer people use Pagerduty casually. That Github has casual users and lazy users does not mean fault tolerance and high availability are 'completely irrelevant'.

It is not. I am just not happy with the alternatives; Gitlab, and Codeberg, for well-discussed reasons. I will pounce as soon as the right one comes along, and I have a few on my radar.

Huh, they usually do? I'm not a full-time developer though so I'm surely biased towards doing the obvious quick fixes or already-discussed things, but discussing how to solve a problem before throwing something at the wall seems like the normal thing to do for me

Or is their point about abandoned projects where the dev never clicks release after merging, or even never merges?

Codeberg isn't a viable infrastructure alternative. Its an opinionated community not a neutral host as they will delete repos based off subjective opinions on LLM usage and resource consumption. If continued hosting is dependent on moderators deciding if a project fits whatever the current philosophy is, and the whims of the moderation team, then I cannot consider it a serious choice for infrastructure.

Infrastructure should be neutral. Codeberg is a social club

Rather use BitBucket or GitLab really, both GitLab and BitBucket have been around nearly as long as GitHub? Apparently BitBucket and GitHub are both 2008, and GitLab is 2011. The others you mentioned could go on a whim.

gitlab has my vote

GitHub being ruined after the AI hype is a shallow take imo. The root problem isn't AI, Microsoft, or Azure; It's why people keep _trusting_ centralized infra.

GitLab and Codeberg can absolutely become trash, each in their own way.

The solution isn't just "migrating off of GitHub"; it's "migrating to a platform that is unownable by design, not only hope".

And there are no good enough decentralized alternatives to GitHub yet.

Tangled.org's decentralization has serious holes. Radicle made an alien universe; a niche within a niche. Also, it's already having problems with ISPs: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move

I started my career in programming with Subversion was the most popular tool. I also had to work a little with VSS, Perforce, Mercurial and, obviously, Git. I was one of the first users of Google Code...

So, relatively, not so long ago it was pretty common to host all this stuff yourself. I don't think (or maybe don't remember) Subversion having any Web interface of its own, but, since forever Git came with GitWeb. I remember configuring it for the first time: any extra bit of configuration, especially those that resulted in some added interactive functionality seemed exciting. For a week, I'd push something to my branch and immediately refresh the browser page to see my changes reflected in the remote repository :D

The infatuation wore off very quickly: after a month I have almost forgotten the Web interface even existed.

The cycle repeated with hosted services, the addition of PR interface, the addition of "pages", the bug reports, the built-in Wiki. After discovering the new gadget and associated hype, invariably, came the realization that the predating existing functionality was... better. The PR discussion in the Web page detached from the code is a lot worse than the PR discussion in the PR itself. The built-in issue tracker doesn't come close to the stand-alone product functionality. The built-in Wiki is ridiculously underwhelming when compared to an actual Wiki.

And so was the CI. For me, it started with Gitlab. There are oh so many reasons to hate Jenkins, so, whenever anyone announced an alternative platform, I'd absolutely check it out, and so did a lot of others, I presume. I was super hyped up about the possibility of running CI from the command line, completely locally on my laptop. And then it turned out to be a bait-and-switch kind of thing. I've created monumental dozen-steps and branching pipelines connecting multiple projects only to realize that the best CI is the one that uses as little as possible of the platform tools.

In the end of the day, I came to realization, that beside the social aspect of the platform like GitHub, everything that it offers on top of the essential Git repository storage is too low quality. And so do competitors. If I was ever again tasked with setting up a company code repository storage, I'd go with a physical server attached to the local office network, unless there's no office, in which case, probably, some EC2 VM would do the job...

Places like GitHub or Gitlab lure you in with their free tier offering, where you get the storage space and some other goodies for free, but once you need to upgrade to the paid tier, you inevitably realize that it's not worth the money they charge for it.

It means it doesn't count towards their uptime at all, I guess, because all their uptime stats are very high for a service that is down more than anything else I use

If you load an issue page, you'll see 1 failed request to:

    /project/product/issues/<number>

    /in-product-messaging/copilot-budget-request-banner
    /in-product-messaging/code-scanning-ai-findings-preview-banner
    /github-copilot/chat
    /_private/browser/stats
    

I was in a very similar situation and this is what I did:

- put Forgejo on a little $5 Vultr VPS (I share the VPS with other things, Forgejo doesn't need much resources. I also added some block storage to host my Docker containers in the Forgejo Docker registry)

- got a 8GB ram cheaper Hetzner VPS (you have to wait for their availability) for around 8 EUR and used that to install the CI runner

- Use Netlify for hosting static sites and PWA

It takes a bit to set up but everything works snappy, clean, and flawlessly. I have unlimited CI minutes. As a bonus I get free Docker image and registry hosting because it's included with Foregejo. I am so, so happy with it all.

Also with Forgejo you just feel like you're using something clean and solid. GitHub started to feel more and more bloated, slow, and unstable.

This, in a nutshell, is why Github is the way it is and there's a lack of good alternatives. I'm not knocking you in particular because we're all pretty much in the same boat here.

"I am willing to pay ~$5-10/mo for a reliable host... Need a repo with PRs and issues, where people can register free account and contribute or raise issues, GH actions CI, and pages host to deploy static sites."

Who wants to build something to acquire that $5-10/mo business? A VPS powerful enough to host a small repository costs more than that these days. There's no opportunity here for someone to build a Github alternative and make any money. The best parts of Github that make it worth using in the first place all come down to the size of the network and that would be extremely difficult to replicate.

It comes down to wanting to develop a SCM hosting service and hitting a $5-10/mo price point. To put that in perspective, people pay more than $5 for a latte and COGS on that is about $1.50 or less. A good customer will come in weekly or more often. I'd rather sell coffee than SaaS SCM.

Update 16:36 UTC - We identified the problematic component and have taken corrective actions. There are strong signs of recovery but we are still working to completely restore service, with error rates still remaining slightly elevated. We will post further updates as recovery continues.

just shy of 3 hours to find the issue

No idea about some of that stuff, as I have more basic needs; nearlyfreespeech.net is cheap and stays out of my way.

Are you paying for GitHub? Are you complaining about an outage from a product you aren't even paying for? You know the whole point of git is you don't _need_ a central server.

I don't understand the entitlement in your post here.

I'm not here to shill, but would SourceHut[1] work for you?

[1] https://sourcehut.org/pricing/

Forgejo is a great fit for what you're describing. I run Fjord, which is managed Forgejo. Our dedicated instances are above your $5-10 budget, but we also run a free public Forgejo instance if you want to try it without operating anything yourself.

Sounds like they don’t have a fine enough lens on some particular class of problems. Been there before. The source of the meta problem is so old few people will learn the lesson that hadn’t known it already.

> GitLab free tier has all I need ... their next tier is $29/mo, which is too much.

Pay every Nth month, or M months per year :-) Use the free tier features throughout.

I’m working on it. Unfortunately ‘high reliability’ also means ‘tons of testing’, and ‘finding all the performance holes before your customers’.

It’s kind of a shame, because Github keeps giving me fantastic ways to toot my own horn, but I can hardly do that if I can’t improve on their numbers.

$work just moved a few dozen repos to GitLab using their import tool, including issues, PRs, comments, etc. It got everything over but stumbled on a few comments.

Not a prop to GitLab, it's kindof table stakes now, just saying whichever place you go, you can find or write a migrator that will capture most of what's in GitHub, assuming their API is up long enough...

Problem with Gitlab is that they will never stop adding features.

Check out `git init --bare`.

You can basically self-host your repos on a cheap VPS. I did that some time ago. You'll have to create a ssh user that has only 'git' as a shell, iirc, on that box. Works okay. But doesn't provide a web ui.

I think that's where https://git-scm.com/docs/gitweb becomes handy.

Check out https://code.storage/

+-------------------------+-------------------------------+

| Total storage limit | Unlimited |

| Git request rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 500+/s/repo) |

| API rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 15k+/s) |

| Max repos | Unlimited |

| Concurrent writes | 30+ |

| Repository size limit | 32TB |

| Git LFS | Supported |

| GitHub/3rd party sync | Supported |

+-------------------------+-------------------------------+

Have your seen safe_sleep.sh?

Is it "growth", or is it actually just "load"?

Github definitely didn't 100x its paying customers, and Github Copilot doesn't seem to have any serious users. Should we really be calling it growth when revenue is flat but server load is exploding due to everyone and their cat vibecoding dozens of throwaway weekend projects?

If Github didn't have insane margins before, they are definitely hemorrhaging money now. If they want to survive they have to introduce strict rate limits and 10x "Vibecoder" pricing tier sooner rather than later - but I bet Microsoft won't let them because it would hurt their already-bad AI revenue...

copilot is also down

Momentum + path of least resistance.

My company is still on GitHub... for now. But incidents like this are becoming more common and I'm becoming less tolerant of it. I suspect many feel the same, but it takes time to persuade the masses.

*People should leave all Microsoft, Google, Meta products en masse

Yup.

No, es lunes.

Copy/paste of a comment I posted a couple months ago:

I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:

> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)

> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.

https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

https://xcancel.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

---

edit: see a counterpoint I posted down-thread.

Their infrastructure is buckling under increased demand from AI generated code.

Imagine the software development lifecycle is a river blocked by several dams- necessary processes that also slow the water’s volume and speed. Writing the code was a very big dam upstream, and successive dams didn’t need to handle a lot of water. With that dam busted wide open, the torrent of code is inundating downstream processes. GitHub happens to host many of them.

Earlier this year the GitHub COO shared a post on Twitter with explosive numbers they were facing. I cannot seem to find it at the moment. (Edit: shared in other replies to this thread.)

I think the most charitable theory is that they're seeing rapidly growing usage (more users churning out higher volumes of code, via LLMs), and are struggling to scale to meet demand.

Alternative theories include "azure sucks" and "they're vibecoding everything now".

They say it's the skyrocketing load because of AI tooling

Many people suspect it's the year-long migrating to Azure and all their products instead of the things they have been using.

People will say LLMs but the issues with GitHub long predate LLMs. It all started when Microsoft acquired them.

Github's, COO Kyle Daigle, claimed that the number of commits has increased 14x since last year. So shear scale has something to do with it. I don't know of too much software already operating a planetary scale that could easily absorb a 14x bump in a year.

Microsoft simply can not make software anymore. I worked at S&P Global and when you work at a global-mega corp, you quickly see why they lose the ability to create anything and just acquire companies to grow.

Microsoft bought it, https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

Totally not because of their movements to Azure.

The CTO discussed it a few months back: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-gi...

AI-Agents are hammering GitHub.

Whatever the actual increase in productivity may be, the commits, clones, pushes, action runs, etc. are skyrocketing.

Lately? GitHub has always been bad with downtime. It hasnt got worse just more visible as people do more CI now than before.

Its all vibes man

I find it quite amusing what they seem to consider "degraded performance" to mean -- I guess if you really squint, your service not working at all is actually just very large latency spikes (until the service recovers) and thus can be labelled as "services experiencing degraded performance for a small portion of our customers".

Interestingly enough if you access the PR number directly it still works.

Not for me. Unicorn error.

gh CLI works for me

By switching to Azure....

I’m hosting my own https://tangled.org knot and spindle, and also hosting and building my own Frontend browser for https://forgejo.org looking forward to open sourcing it in the future for others to enjoy.

For people who want a similar experience today, I’d recommend trying Codeberg (An official instance of Forgejo) though. However, keep in mind they voted in July to ban mostly AI generated repositories. You can read about that here: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

GitLab is probably the most reasonable alternative. I migrated and it took me some weeks to adapt to the new CI, but for my use case it's basically equivalent in features.

I started with the cloud version, then moved to self-hosted because it wasn't a big effort for our team. We also reduced our monthly invoice by about 50% after the move.

* GitLab

* Forgejo

Those are my favorites. Both you can self-host for your company, including CI/CD.

Just out of curiousity, do people here have non-business-related need for GHA? I've never really seen the use of it for anything I wanted to make on my own time; it's more than easy enough to run tests locally, even on my 12-year-old office desktop.

(I'm only using it implicitly because it's how the blog publishing system works under the hood, but the SSG still runs locally.)

Forgejo is probably worth a look if Actions compatibility and an easy migration are priorities. I run Fjord, a dedicated managed Forgejo, so you don't have to operate it yourself. We can help with the migration and runners too.

We also have a free public Forgejo instance if you want to try it first.

I am building an MIT-licensed compatible alternative to GitHub Actions at github.com/automata-ci/automata. Very early in development but it already runs some of our internal workflows.

[dead]

The error rate is 100% on the service that allows you to create PRs in the web site. Actual remote git service is working just fine. I might try the API to make a PR, see if that's working.

Update: yes that worked. gh CLI using the API was able to make a PR while the web interface was inoperable.

Second update: defeat from the jaws of victory -- the page that displays open PRs is also down.

Third update: CI isn't working anyway, so the CLI PR creation workaround doesn't achieve much.

20%, do we just make numbers up?

Sure, but it's not just the reoo. It's PR's, code review and you've got a bunch of actions then it's difficult (not impossible) to deal with those being down.

Not sure covid was the sole driving force. A combination of MS taking over and deciding to move it to Azure, a massive increase in traffic due to ai usage (not that this should be an excuse for a platform that should be scaleable), and Github going all in on AI usage to write its own code.

They're making it very easy for a viable alternative to pop up and take their lunch - it just wont be Gitlab.

I don't have data for it, but I have been a Github user since 2012 and have found it to be down often for pretty much that entire time. I always figured it's cultural to a degree–new features always seem pretty buggy/underbaked, and often continue to long term but remain unloved and incomplete.

Enterprise here and it's down all the time. Right now and it was down 4 days ago as well.

IMO this is what they should be doing first to stop the bleeding. I believe a huge portion of their traffic is leech traffic.

Ideally they'd grandfather in accounts that were created long before the spammer days :)

AFAIK there is nothing like this out there, because there is not one standard for a "pull reauest" in the sense of how a web based forge does it. and it gets complicated quickly due to complexity of git and forks.

the closest thing i've found are tooks like https://github.com/raylabshq/gitea-mirror

Git gets you 90% of the way there. Sounds like you just want a decentralized review solution to go with it.

Funny because I spent a couple of years on self-hosted Gitea, including doing some work on Gitea itself to add features we wanted. Then I changed projects and thought "well that was a lot of work, let's just do what everyone does and use GitHub". Now twiddling my thumbs this morning...wondering if I need to resurrect the Gitea deployment.

experiences, as if we're in disneyland

It sounds like what I was seeing when trying to view PRs last night, so it started almost 12 hours ago.

The larger the company, the more likely that it's enmeshed with Microsoft in some of its parts. Microsoft is relentless in expanding its footprint with vendor lock-in and cross-sells until it replaces all competitors.

Pass the buck. There's no one to blame but yourself if you're self-hosting.

"Yeah we're unable to offer services, but so is [X BIG CORP] and [Y BIG CORP]. It's an industry outage, nothing we can do!"

Hey, only 8 hours from open to close. What's all the complaining about?

(I know, I know, no sarcasm here, but sometimes it feels necessary.)

They've been moving to it, which is likely part of the problem.

yes as they say they do it in order to power resource-heavy, next-generation AI workflows like GitHub Copilot and autonomous agentic developer tools

Ideally something like IPNS to have a mutable ref based on (repo, pubkey, branch) to resolve a commit hash, a DHT for who has what commit hashes, and then just p2p transfers. You could still have a github or gitlab for issues and CI, but code (and maybe issues) could all be p2p like git is already designed for. Your forge could also act as a peer for code cloning, of course.

For us the uptime issues have been annoying but not consequential enough to justify the work / risk of moving.

I suspect even poor uptime for many services is a cosmetic problem for most users.

I think the clear reason is even with their unreliability, the cost of migrating off of GitHub for _most_ places is not worth it, and so companies don't / won't (yet)

Its hard to get lemmings to change course.

[flagged]

They actually _did_ hit zero nines of availability a few months ago.

Biggest problem with Fossil is immutable history. That’s a design choice, and I respect them for that, but it’s not the right choice for me.

[flagged]

While i get the sentiment and the frustration, I highly doubt an SRE worked on the hamburger menu.

In my experience some teams move a lot faster than others and that leads to asymmetric quality. If all devs could pick up a new language and skillset overnigh then companies would have a lot more flexibility in their roadmaps, but humans don't scale that way - with or without AI.

As someone who maintained a product that was, until recently, on Azure DevOps, stay away. Like, really really far away. There's nothing positive I can say about it.

The worry I would have is, is anybody at MS still working on it? It is barely updated anymore:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates?filters=%5B%22Azur...

That's not necessarily a bad thing for stability, but long-term I would not be surprised if it gets EOL-ed, or radically shrunk to just a basic Git mirroring service.

I absolutely agree. I don't feel that I have sufficient evidence that they even really care about these reliability problems.

I build Fjord, managed Forgejo with runners. The idea is to keep the GitHub-like workflow without having to operate the forge and CI infrastructure yourself.

Why excluding GitLab?

For your personal projects, do they _need_ to be on a remote git server with a full GUI?

That’s not the story I’m hearing. Large numbers of developers were moved away from ADO when they bought GitHub. ADO has more or less been on feature freeze for years.

Less conspiratorially; they may care a lot less about it than ADO, and not give it the priority/resources they would otherwise. Neglect can often do the work of malign intention.

As the saying goes, 'No one gets fired for choosing Microsoft solutions'.

I've talked to a number people in IT and commonly found they use Linux or Mac at home, as their daily, and Windows only at work.

Talking one of the IT works in the company I work for, they were forced to move from GitLab to GitHub because the CTO wants Microsoft everywhere. When all you know are screwdrivers, a personal will gladly use them as a hammer, punch, ....

Back in my IT days, we were pushing for marbled solutions. Example, 50% of the computers have antivirus brand Y and 50% have antivirus brand Z. Or the Windows servers used a different antivirus solution than the desktop. I don't see this anymore in the industry. One basket and all eggs go inside.

Irony, I'm updating code so our main products no longer require Windows as the host OS.

You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and solutions.

Microsoft has thrived like this for 40 years

I was vaguely remembering that there’s http://githubstatusstatus.com, but it isn’t very helpful unfortunately.

Yep. Github issues mostly hit when it's morning in the USA and that load comes online. i.e. afternoon in UK and Europe.

Who are you kidding, nobody has been in since the start of August!

They forgot "make no mistakes AND write tight code that can fit demand into existing shitty unstable Azure infrastructure"

Do y'all have any evidence that github's recent outages are caused by slopcode rather than the significant increase in load, which is exactly what Github & MS have been claiming as the root cause?

I'm tired of these BS stories being pushed by green accounts on HN like there's some damn agenda by someone who thinks their job will be saved "if only the CEOs realized that Slopcode Bad".

It certainly wasn't (for a few hours)....

I'm mad, but also secretly happy as it pushes their uptime numbers lower, which has its own, self-reinforcing allure.

I'll never get lack of sex used as an insult, unless you are a teenager. Is your self worth that tied to sexual activity so to use it as an insult? Is it that a rare thing to "achieve" for you to put it on a pedestal and demean others based on the lack of it?