GitHub's Historic Uptime (damrnelson.github.io)

by todsacerdoti 122 comments 500 points
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122 comments

[−] fishtoaster 45d ago
Is the pre-2018 data actually accurate? There seem to have been a number of outages before then: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&...

Maybe that's just the date when they started tracking uptime using this sytem?

[−] OlivOnTech 45d ago
Data comes from the official status page. It may be more a marketing/communication page than an observability page (especially before selling)
[−] pikzel 45d ago
The status page was often down when GH was down, back in the days.
[−] tibbon 45d ago
I could imagine a leadership or viewpoint change in how they reported when/what was down.

I've seen so many times where Company A will complain that their vendors aren't accurate enough about uptime and how Company A notices first that their vendors are down, but then they themselves have a very laggy or inaccurate status page.

We want our vendors to be accurate to the minute on these, but many CTOs don't care to admit when they too have problems.

[−] xiaoyu2006 45d ago
Aha we need a status page of status page.
[−] BrenBarn 45d ago
Sup dawg I heard you like status pages.
[−] w0m 45d ago
i assume they simply fixed the status page in 2018.. lol.
[−] mholt 45d ago
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.

[−] hk__2 45d ago
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.
[−] phillipcarter 45d ago
FWIW if people are looking for a reason why, here's why I think it's happening: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
[−] shrinks99 45d ago
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.

[−] zja 45d ago
[−] dewey 45d ago
I remember a lot of unicorn pages back in the days. Maybe the status page was just not updated that regularly back then?
[−] BadBadJellyBean 45d ago
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.
[−] frenchie4111 45d ago
Github's migration to Azure has so far been a hilariously bad advertisement for Azure
[−] otterley 45d ago
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.
[−] alberth 45d ago
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.

[−] llama052 45d 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.

[−] 8organicbits 45d ago
I'd like to move off GitHub, and I deploy some websites using GitHub Pages, so I took a look at the availability of static web hosting; GH actually does really well on this metric, although Fastly, the CDN they use, should get the credit.

https://alexsci.com/blog/static-hosting-uptime/

[−] starkparker 45d ago
The biggest spikes are Github Actions, starting November 2019. They didn't go GA until November 13, 2019: https://siliconangle.com/2019/11/13/github-universe-announce...
[−] bob1029 45d ago
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.
[−] SamuelAdams 45d ago
It could also be that they have more customers / clients now, or offer more capabilities.
[−] chenzhekl 45d ago
My impression is that, before Microsoft acquired GitHub, GitHub went for many years without really introducing new features, so part of its stability came from the fact that it wasn’t very ambitious or proactive about improving.
[−] _air 45d ago
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.
[−] barryhennessy 45d ago
It’s actually great to see a living example of how sensitive users* are to what to a lay person would look like a small amount of downtime.

The fact that we’re all talking about it, and not at all surprised, is a great example we can take when making the case for more 9’s of reliability.

* well, very technical power users.

[−] verdverm 45d 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.
[−] darkhorn 45d 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.
[−] TimLeland 45d ago
How much of the downtime is due to all the AI code being committed?
[−] landsman 45d ago
It is ridiculous how company owned by Microsoft, making non sense money on Azure, is let to die like this. That's have to be a soft of plan or something. So sad to watch it.
[−] fontain 45d ago
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.

[−] robshippr 45d 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"
[−] davebren 44d ago
Reminder to keep local backups of everything important while the reliability of all these services continues to degrade.
[−] mcherm 45d ago
The significance of the changeover would be much more impactful if the chart showed a longer history.
[−] rvz 45d ago
I guess "centralizing everything" to GitHub was never a good idea and called it 6 years ago. [0]

Looking at this now, you might as well self host and you would still get better uptime than GitHub.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

[−] joey5403 45d ago
Based on the graphics, Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing very well
[−] addaon 44d ago
Historical, not historic. Extremely not historic.
[−] keybored 45d ago
I think you mean GitHub’s histrionic uptime.
[−] redwood 45d ago
I wonder if they got moved to Azure in 2019?
[−] jrochkind1 45d ago
Honestly I think their status page just got more honest -- and they are graphing this in such a way that any partial outage to any service looks really bad on teh chart.

There were definitely partial outages to services inside that row of horizontal green dots, that the status page just wasn't advertising.

[−] josefritzishere 45d ago
That's pretty stark.
[−] neop1x 43d ago
Powered by Azure™
[−] yakkomajuri 45d 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?
[−] wiseowise 45d ago
Programming is a solved problem, btw.
[−] qrush 45d ago
hot take: I would accept ads under every PR comment in GitHub if we could get back to 3 or 4 nines of reliability.
[−] Jaco07 45d ago
[dead]
[−] theaicloser 45d ago
[flagged]
[−] tonymet 45d ago
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