In my eyes it would be a ginormous gain to our colective mental health to not have the expectation to contribute to open source projects for free, or to have "green squares" every day on a public GitHub profile.

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.

This is the way. Stop centralizing everything.

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

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

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

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

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/

Otherwise there's no "we", Git is decentralized. Everyone can use whatever they want.

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

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.

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

Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.

And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).

Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.

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.

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

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.

"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!"

* Forgejo

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

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

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

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

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.

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

tangled.org!

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 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.

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

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-...

Once this is done, the team would have two possible git remotes to work with. Given that gitea also allows mirroring with Github, the team would be able to even switch to Gitea as the "main" git remote and for PR reviews even if the CI part is still on Github.

The harder part would be migrating the CI jobs. But this also can be done in parallel and no one needs to cut out their Github actions immediately. Start with the simplest of the stages, e.g, the automated test suite, and once you get the whole pipeline from Woodpecker on an staging environment, you'd could take another weekend to test the whole workflow. Once the first project is successfully migrated, it becomes a matter of repeating the process.

Woodpecker is still a bit finicky and debugging it can be a bit annoying, but given that it's all based on docker it is a lot easier to debug a pipeline locally.

EVERY other client I've ever worked with used their own gitforge or at least bitbucket...

This is the outcome of violating single responsibility principle in business.

With every single of these enterprise 'cloud' offerings you are giving (almost) complete power over your business/project to somebody else who couldn't care less about your success or failure, you are simply irrelevant for them. I see it at work too, every time critical external systems go down whole bank stops still, just because few bucks were saved yearly on some on-prem servers.

Look at it this way, you are learning some important lesson today and finding great area of improvement for resiliency from now on.

Not if you want to make sure it compiles and works on Windows (which you don't have) or macOS (which you don't have and can't emulate). That's something github gives for free, and for me, it's the only reason to stay on github for small/tiny free software projects (at least as a secondary host).

My significant other was just let go from their job as a scapegoat for an organizational error: 3 layers of failure - IC, manager, director, and the IC was let go. The error caused a 7 figure loss for the company that has 10 figures of revenue per year. The manager and director may not see any consequences, though the director will probably be forced out by end-of-year due to incompetence. The new executive has taken to firing employees much more eagerly than their predecessor, like some sort of Jack Welch acolyte.

Their firing has put a lot of things into perspective for me. Mostly, fuck "at-will" employment and its negative effect on the American social contract.

But also this "angry ranting" online that the original poster was referencing. Not everyone has the privilege to calmly respond to things that directly impact their livelihood.

Or, maybe your #1 IT priority was moving everything to Azure instead ;)

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

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

https://imgur.com/b0Xj3Z6

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

On Twitter, it's mostly the networking effect, you want to be where peoples are, and unless a large chunk move at once, you are stuck there.

On Github, it's the technical cost of migrating, the git part is trivial, but tickets, PR history and CI/Integration are another can of worms.

Projects which moved away, moved away for good, at most only leaving a synchronized mirror.

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.

Even if the platform itself doesn't take off, the protocol and the data ownwership (you host your repo artifacts, issues, prs, etc on your ATproto server) mean that a competitor could come in easily if you were no longer satisfied with performance, reliability, or monetization.

Note that raw user numbers won't really cut it; if 1 million people left Twitter, it's possible that 500 000 of those people joined and 500 000 new people joined; the user numbers would look like everyone returned, but really only 50% did in this hypothetical.

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.

Which they encouraged by pushing Copilot down everyone's throat

There are many git hosting options, including some for self hosting. its a lot easier to switch to a different version control host than to a different version control system.

Seems like it's far from production-ready and there hasn't been much activity this year?

It's absurd that I have dozens of repos, many with GH Actions that run CI, test and then package and push to prod/package managers, and haven't paid GH anything.

This isn't "psyops". Sure, it's a bad side of social interactions, but when you interact with other people, there's always some of this - in person as well as online.

The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".

I have no argument that selling popularity is bad and filtering by stars is stupid, but I don't blame Github for any of that.

You could equally well assign the success of certain coders to YouTube because they came to attention by showing off their work in livestreams. Which I do not. They found a way to advertise their own success, but it's theirs.

> Posted 1 minute ago. Aug 17, 2026 - 13:58 UTC

It also took them 20 minutes to realize that peoples requests to /pull/xx are not working :D

But maybe I’m wrong?

Github is actually down and I can't push code right now, it's blocking my business which is unacceptable. It's a broken tool.

https://youtu.be/iBDUTaKWVdU

Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.

- It was believed that GitHub would be more reliable than our self hosted Gitlab CI runners. This has proven to be very false.

- It was believed it would be easier to write tooling. I’m not on the dev tooling team, so can’t confirm if they found it true or not, but from the outside I see a lot more “Github can’t do that” than I did “Gitlab can’t do it”

the comment doesnt say you should be "fine" with the unreliability.

they are saying people shouldnt get so emotionally worked up over it. which, while i wouldn't phrase it in the way the parent did, i agree with the direction of their point.

Largest shareholder (27%), not majority.

But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house.

And I don't think that GitHub is devoid of SLA: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla

The issue is that they're not achieving two nines uptime in practice.

However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...

You mean people pushing LLM assisted coding, or github's own coders pushing LLM assisted code to production ? :-).

I am more inclined to think that it is the second, but if the reason is the first, what is particular hard to scale ? It's not like everybody is vide-coding into a single repository, so I would expect that most of the load would naturally be scalable by increasing the resources. If for some reason that is not possible, I would expect a corporation as big as Github to keep the paying customers working by gracefully denying service to the free tier, not to collapse like an house of cards.

Despite minimal new features, and drastically increasing hardware resources to keep up, self-hosted GitHub enterprise went from things being instant to most requests taking many seconds. And activity on issues in one repository tends to mysteriously re-open issues with the same number in other repositories.

I think they are vibe coding and facing the consequences.

The "AI is using a lot of resources" excuse was maybe acceptable last year but not in Q3 2026.

I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.

Anyone here have data on whether the likes of gitlab have been impacted in the same was as github?

https://docs.gitlab.com/install/docker/installation/#install...

I would argue they are. You can't cache a git repository and send people what it looked like a minute ago, because someone might have pushed 2 seconds ago.

NB: I am not OP but just providing some context as to why they might think this.

- we are getting no benefit beyond getting excuses replies to our emails - right or wrong, but we depend heavily on GitHub actions so this has a very real impact on us

Tangled.org really been working to ensure all their features work from data hosted on your personal data server (it's based on ATproto) which means should their performance, reliability, or monetization ever get you down it's easy to switch to a competitor since you're not locked in.

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

"Unless you have a emergency hotfix (you don’t), go hit the gym or walk outside." with assumptions like above.

If it was, "hey they f*ed up but there's no point having an overly emotional reaction" that would be fine. But he seems to be justifying this. Especially with Github's record up to now of unreliability I think it's completely fair to be annoyed.

There is no separate enterprise platform unless you buy their self hosted server product.

If I build something that satisfies me and say 100 users (who all star me) does that really say anything. Are those 100 stars even "real" any more?

All the old problems of the web are new again, and still remain unsolved.

Hell, even I do it.

not to mention that any business which could potentially lose enough money that they would need to let go of developers from a github outage should probably already have some business continuity plans in place.

But I’m more lenient with codeberg because they are a non-profit and as you say, they are banning vibe-coded project because of the cost to infrastructure. In the meantime, GitHub is encouraging vibe-coding, multiplication of the source code, and genAI discussions.

At most normal companies you monitor your systems and address potential bottlenecks before they reach a tipping point. And generally you want enough headroom that a sudden 2-3x increase in demand wouldn't take out the service.

Either Github's technical leadership/talent is completely out of their depth (seems unlikely), or they're not hiring enough engineers to work on these capacity issues.

Manager: Why is the site down!?

Engineer: Because it can’t handle this level of traffic. We can rate limit to the level we can handle to keep the service running.

Manager: Okay, let’s do that!

Engineer: Okay. Rate limiting at N req/min.

Manager: I’m getting complaints we’re denying service to customers!? We can’t rate limit our users if they want to use it. Increase the rate limits.

I’ve had this conversation more than once in my career.

You can argue that the lack of diversity in infrastructure is bad, and I wouldn’t disagree. I think we should have more projects to explore better ways of working. But, the tradeoff is that when you have a centralized system, like GitHub, you also have less friction. The learning curve is small when everything uses the same tools.

some investors use stars (and star growth velocity) to determine which projects they invest or don't invest in. (not saying it's good or bad - just saying it's a real thing.)

Why is it hilarious to believe that the industry leader might be better at something than doing it yourself?

It's not all that different from, say, an AWS region having a service impact. People would rather complain about AWS than prepare and utilize a well-tested recovery plan to shift to a standby region. Oftentimes there's no fallback plan because the business already considered it and decided it was too costly relative to the benefit, but when the incident happens, they still can't help but complain. Humans being humans.

It all ties back to the OP, where the issue you've might not be as bad as you think. I have been in situations where we have dropped all procedures to push a hot fix because we were actively bleeding money, and in situations where you know there is an issue, and you let it be.