▲fishtoaster49 minutes ago
[-] reply▲OlivOnTech23 minutes ago
[-] Data comes from the official status page. It may be more a marketing/communication page than an observability page (especially before selling)
reply▲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.
montroser49 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%).
verdverm38 minutes ago
[-] reply▲marcosdumay42 seconds ago
[-] That's how you count uptime. You system is not up if it keeps failing when the user does some thing.
The problem here is the specification of what the system is. It's a bit unfair to call GH a single service, but it's how Microsoft sells it.
If you're using all services, then any partial outage is essentially a full outage.
Of course, you can massage the numbers to make it look nicer in the way you described but the conservative approach is better for the customers.
If you insist, one could create this metric for selected services only to "better reflect users".
That being said, even when looking at the split uptimes, you'd have to do a very skewed weighting to achieve a number with more than one 9.
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.
reply▲naniwaduni1 minute ago
[-] Nobody cares about every part of GitHub working correctly. I mean, ok, their SREs are supposed to, but tabling the question of whether that's true: if tomorrow they announced a distributed no-op service with 100% downtime, you should not have the intuition that the overall availability of the platform is now worse.
reply▲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”?
reply▲As long as they brand it as a part of GitHub by calling it "GitHub Copilot" and integrate it into the GitHub UI, I think it's fair game.
reply▲mememememememo1 minute ago
[-] What is Google's uptime (including every single little thing with Google in the name)?
reply▲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.
> 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.
Not to go too out of my way to defend GH's uptime because it's obviously pretty patchy, but I think this is a bad analogy. Most customers won't have a hard reliability on every user-facing gh feature. Or to put it another way there's only going to be a tiny fraction of users who actually experienced something like the 90% uptime reported by the site. Most people are in practice are probably experienceing something like 97-98%.
skipants50 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.
reply▲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.
reply▲You can click on "Breakdown" and then on "Actions" to hide it.
reply▲Even worse, those features show "100% uptime" pre-existence on the breakdowns page too.
reply▲How much of the downtime is due to all the AI code being committed?
reply▲I'm not a GitHub apologist, but that graph isn't at scale, at all. It's massively zoomed in, with a lower band of 99.5%. It makes it look far worse than it is.
reply▲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.
irishcoffee56 minutes 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.
But GitHub actions is not Git?
reply▲lcnPylGDnU4H9OF39 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.
reply▲phillipcarter1 hour ago
[-] reply▲llama05227 seconds ago
[-] It's absolutely this. Our Azure outages correlate heavily with Github outages. It's almost a meme for us at this point.
reply▲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.
reply▲I remember a lot of unicorn pages back in the days. Maybe the status page was just not updated that regularly back then?
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
It could even be both % and offline hours per year. To me the percentage is simpler to understand.
reply▲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.
reply▲llama05219 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.
Also the fact that the azure status page remains green is normal. Just assume it's statically green unless enough people notice.
It could also be that they have more customers / clients now, or offer more capabilities.
reply▲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.
bigfatkitten13 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.
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.
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.
reply▲robshippr48 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"
reply▲The significance of the changeover would be much more impactful if the chart showed a longer history.
reply▲theaicloser45 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.
reply▲I wonder if they got moved to Azure in 2019?
reply▲verdverm31 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.
reply▲darkhorn41 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.
reply▲yakkomajuri58 minutes 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?
reply▲hot take: I would accept ads under every PR comment in GitHub if we could get back to 3 or 4 nines of reliability.
reply▲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