Why is the title of the post-mortem "GitHub Outage"? It makes it sound like Lovable somehow brought down GitHub, when in reality it seems like they were rate-limited by GitHub for creating lots of repositories, then got their GitHub App completely blocked for breaching the Terms of Service.<p>> Incident report for the GitHub outage on January 2-3, 2025<p>Writing it like that looks like you're pushing the blame on your downtime/outage to GitHub, like they're responsible for your application to be up, instead of taking full responsibility for it.
The same user who posted this (Henrik501) also posted a comment two days ago (their only HN comment so far) praising the Lovable team for their incident response:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42646297">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42646297</a><p>And now this post with an exaggerated title. Seems like they're shilling and trying to make Lovable sound like a product with such huge traction that it "even brought Github down". They keep making outlandish claims on social media too, like reaching $4m ARR in 5 weeks etc. This company is very suspicious.
Many mistakes were made by Lovable that they could be berated for but on a more positive note, there is a lesson for us all: if you're doing something that you're worried about being problematic (e.g: creating a large volume of GitHub repositories) reaching out is a good thing but it is important to understand who you are reaching out to. GitHub is a huge organization, front-line support is not likely to have intimate knowledge of how exactly the acceptable usage policy is enforced nor the permission to make agreements. The key when reaching out is to find someone who has authority on the subject. Ideally, GitHub's front-line support would have escalated to the appropriate person/team but that isn't always possible (maybe they don't know who, maybe they're having a bad day and forgot). If the answer you get seems too convenient, it is probably not correct.
Title is misleading. Clicked thinking this startup caused a GitHub outage.<p>Getting a flag like this hardly “overloaded” anything. Alerts for these things usually trigger well below any actual risk to the system.
I don't really understand how a well funded startup like this, with something that is relatively trivial, yet critical to their product, decided to just shove it into GitHub.
315,000 repositories + 10,000 per day? They were obviously correctly concerned this wouldn't be able to go on forever, hence the pre-emptive email, and of course they got the response saying it was okay, but I really feel like this is the kind of thing that's too dangerous to leave your company sitting on because sooner or later they were going to be told "no". It feels too much like it's found a point of arbitrage in Github's ToS, and indeed ended up causing problems.<p>I suppose they did respond pretty fast, but if I were them I'd have liked to have had the S3 option in my back pocket earlier. Maybe I'm just being too risk-averse here...
git is not github, and its kind of funny that the best these guys could come up with for storing git repos of text files was using github. any competent dev could come up with a solution in an afternoon. using github at all tells you quite a bit
Interestingly, currently the site has this:<p>>We're currently investigating issues. Please stay tuned until this error banner has been updated.<p>When I try to create a new project, it says "An unknown error occurred with the code sandbox"<p>Something about S3-backed repos didn't work out?<p>UPD. "Under maintenance: Lovable is currently not able to reach the cloud provider for our previews, fly.io" Now it's fly.io's problem, not GitHub's
The title ("Year old startup overloaded GitHub – Incident report") is a misrepresentation. A coding-LLM-as-a-service startup got banned by GitHub for abusing it by creating thousands of repositories.