GitHub is a <i>lot</i> more enticing now it has free private repos and the launch of Actions. I suspect they're a lot busier than they were before Microsoft. More features also naturally means more status tickets.
Taking the numbers at their face value this is a good exercise in some text book statistical test of hypothesis.<p>Incidents: Before 89. After 126. What is the chance of this happening if the 'rate' of occurrence has not changed ?<p>Assuming an unknown but constant Poisson rate, we get the probability of observing what has been observed to be 0.00225.<p>A fortuitous thing about this test is that one does not need to know what that unknown constant rate is.
It's easy to see from the uptime history [1] that there have been many more incidents in April-June than in January-April.<p>Don't know if that has anything to do with the Microsoft acquisition, but it is concerning.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=1</a>
This is a thinly veiled advert, and tells you literally nothing concrete, apart from Github's status page is updated more. The article even admits this!
Has anyone noticed their search has gotten worse? I sometimes will search for some code that I know exists in a repo, but it gives no results, and when searching a little later it shows them as I expect.<p>We have Github enterprise, and Slack notifications when Github has any issues. Nearly every week there’s a problem, sometimes it’s resolved in a few minutes, other times it goes for an hour or so. I’ve pondered the question if there has been more outages since the MS acquisition and in my experience that’s a hard yes.
What I don't get is how they can be down for hours on end. If I make a deploy that turns out to be buggy, I'll roll my site back to a stable previous version within minutes. Sure, that's not always possible if I've made incompatible database schema changes, but in my experience those are very, very rare (i.e. I almost always add db columns, and only rarely delete or rename columns - and when I do, I do so after those columns haven't been in use for a while).
Independent of whether it's been down more frequently since the acquisition, I find Github's status page reporting to be lacking. It's also quite generous with definitions of outages and downtime.<p>For example, on June 22nd they had an issue whereby half of their nameservers were responding with an empty answer for queries for github.com. A very nice explanation is here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23605409" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23605409</a>. So for roughly half of users (including myself) this would have manifested itself as a complete outage. It also lasted for a good couple of hours. Yet on their status page it's listed as a 46 minute degradation only.<p>So relying on their status page reporting to draw conclusions about availability (as Statusgator seems to) will mean that an overly optimistic picture of availability is presented.
I really wish there was an option to decouple the core git functionality from the 'fancy' stuff (PRs, actions, issues) etc. When your CI pipeline runs directly from your git repository, not being able to commit/merge means you cannot release to production.<p>For binary artifacts, you can get around dependencies on a single provider by mirroring, but because git is mutable, you can't just mirror the repo and allow changes there, because you need the same permissions, ssh keys etc. for the repositories and because changes will need to be synced back to the source repository. You might as well not use Github in the first place and self-host (with all the problems that entails).<p>As far as I know, none of the major git providers offer this - I've experienced outages with GitLab, Bitbucket and GitHub that all affected the production environment (luckily, it's never been critical so far).
Definitelly by my perosnal experience.<p>Part of it might be due to covid, but it started happening before that.<p>On the positive side, github had tone of changes since then, all seem to be good ones, so its understandable that it has more problems now as well.
A number of the staff who left GitHub in protest of the ICE contract were senior SRE. I wonder if the data says anything about the dates of their departures...
Looking at the chart, there were more warns but fewer downtimes so I'd say no. There was one giant downtime that happened, but I don't know why it happened so it's hard to say if there was a cause relevant to the acquisition. The other downtimes that happened seemed to be slightly longer in duration than before.
I'm more inclined to believe this is due to the increased reporting and attention to the status rather than an actual increase in downtime.<p>However, I have no hard data to suggest that, only my experience as someone who's had to manage and maintain reports like this.
Anyone from GH willing to share - anonymously maybe - some insights? I really find the lack of post-mortems from GitHub outages a bit... weird given GH audience. I think all we dev could learn from a properly written public GH post-mortem.
Personally I think it is connected to adding more features to GitHub. Microsoft is rolling out more and more small but also big changes, and as everyone knows, this always can have a few minutes downtime for each update.
This analysis has a significant comparability problem because of added features. The core git-repository service is almost never down, but GitHub Actions has had a lot of reliability problems (you can see this clearly on the status page). But GitHub Actions is new, so it skews the recent availability problems up. Unfortunately, as the post notes, the detailed status information is _also_ new, so it's not really possible to analyze the data accurately.
This was prompted by the latest "Github is down" (now transformed to "Github was down" by the arrow of time):<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675864" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675864</a>
Github is evolving pretty rapidly than I thought it would. I like their new changes. Deep underneath it being with Microsoft just reminds me of oracle/google debacle. Definitely discourages big projects to be hosted there.
There's already one news on front page <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675864" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675864</a><p>Can we merge them? Mods
I mean makes sense. They are probably migrating their infrastructure over to Microsoft’s and such.<p>Disclaimer: I don’t work at MS so no clue, but have been part of acquisitions
Any chance that prior to acquisition there was more focus on stability —- because it was assumed there would be a buyer —- than upgrading to the latest version of Rails and adding features?
tl;dr yes - and an exception to Betteridge's law!!! <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a>
Anecdotally, yes. I almost never saw internal error pages before, now I've been seeing them every week for a few weeks. Some people need to be fired.
What’s really wonderful is when Github goes down I get a flurry of people broadcasting on Slack channels that they can’t work and all their builds are failing, and I’m wondering What they want me to do about it. Should I get out and push? Call Bill Gates? Tweet Trump? When Github doesn’t work that’s your excuse to go get coffee, grab a pint, browse Hacker News, etc. - people should be happy with GitHub goes down. (Or self-host gitea and work from that if your so determined to keep on)
Yes.<p>Last time it was down was just 6 days ago: [0]<p>I think its time to look for alternatives or frankly in the long term, follow what some open-source orgs are doing and self-host instead.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23604944" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23604944</a>
Both the link and github comments are down for me too; I am unsure whether it has been down more since the acquisition but this is unacceptable to me. I have been trying to post a comment to an issue i made for the last few hours and every time it says "You can't comment at this time" which I find very misleading. It should say "Sorry, our system has a problem, please try again later". The implication of the current message is that my permissions are wrong or something else has happened.<p>This has bumped self-hosting all my repositories much higher up my list.