To me this correlates more to them being bought by Microsoft, a company known for being seemingly incapable of creating quality software to the point that it's not even funny anymore, and also known for sloppifying all the products they touch.
I don't think so. GitHub was bought by Microsoft 8 years ago and people have only started complaining about its uptime in the last year or so - exactly correlating with the surge in LLM use.
It's not the whole story. The biggest change is actually the internal rules for how downtime was reported, it wasn't actually such a large change in the actual reliability then.
I don't think so. I've seen those complaints for more than a year.
I have an Ops background and I strongly suspect they were given a stupid timeline for the Azure migration.
I've got to believe Microsoft have decent Ops people but the management wanted to move faster than was reasonable and screwed it up. Move one thing at a time and double check it all works and you can do a migration like this.
I've lived through two acquisitions by the world-largest companies (and few more smaller ones). Here's my impression of what often happens in situations like this:
* There's a huge disconnect between the actual product and what was sold to the buyer. It could be that the product was a borderline fraud, or it could be that the product was actually much better quality than the expectation on the buyer's side, but the buyer isn't interested in most of the product.
* Fear spreads in the acquired company that their product will be discontinued or reshaped into something else.
* The pay is good, probably much better than before the company was bought.
* Many internal teams end up lacking real purpose and try to insert themselves into every new internal project only to obfuscate their irrelevance.
This leads to some pathological developments, where the teams previously working on acquired products start doing a lot of useless, for-show work. Internal initiatives sprout like mushrooms after a summer rain, but they are all plagued by very broad (and mostly irrelevant) team involvement, duplication of existing products / services, and fear of being discovered. And while there are plenty of such initiatives, their role is to be a superficial distraction. In reality, everyone is afraid to touch the old code or do any sensible integration because it could lead to blanket firing of a lot of people. The middle-management behavior becomes a sort of exchange of favors, where everyone is afraid that the other can blackmail them into losing their job, and so everyone is trying to be extra nice by offering a slice of a pie to another manager.
What this leads to, in reality, is insane inertia (often despite highly shortened software release cycles), astronomic amounts of unmitigated tech. debt, opacity in communication with management, persecution of those who genuinely want to improve the system.
Based on this, my prediction is that Github will not survive. Just like Skype didn't. Somehow or other, Microsoft will find a way to replace the product with... MS Outlook with a new skin.
Even on a large timeline there is just a lot of risk when migrating legacy infra to an entirely new system, especially if the original arch grew "organically" and has tones of edge cases.
I always figured these problems were directly related to the migration.
> people have only started complaining about its uptime in the last year or so
I'm sorry but this made me laugh out loud. That isn't true at all, this has been going on for years. This conversation[0] from six years ago has discussion about the outages starting to become much more frequent in December 2019. It has never gotten better in that time, it's just continually degraded.
Ok I should have said people have only started constantly complaining in the past year or so. Of course there was the odd complaint in the past, but now I see a thread about it at least ever month on HN, and loads of articles about migration off GitHub.
GitHub Actions was always a mess. Because it is a Microsoft product.
If you want to have a horrible time, try reading some of the runner code. It's early 2010s-style Windows-First, MSFT C# crud that has trouble not racing several threads to inconclusive status codes.
Yes. That was my impression too. Github Actions aren't a good product in many ways. It's also very complex and requires quite a bit more infrastructure than the rest of Github. Unfortunately, I don't think that the commercial side of the product would allow it to improve in the direction of better quality / uptime. It's cursed to be forever like MS Outlook: whenever it changes it's for the worse, even though it was never good.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not, because it has all the signals of a joke, but it might be closer to true than I'd like to admit.
At my work, the average quality has gone up with "blindly trusting Opus". The failure modes are horrendous and the code is verbose as shit, but it still works better. Most "engineers" aren't very good at writing code.
It's true, Microsoft made github worse, but the more recent issues seem to have to do a lot more with Microsoft selling its soul to AI. Microsoft really appears to have gotten dumber as they became dependent on AI. Most recent example: they used to promote Win11 and 32GB RAM. Now they are down to 8GB silently ... this is quite hilarious. There are now so many side effects that you see degradation in so many other areas. Or the gaming industry: it is not quite dying but it is taking a huge hit with skyrocketing RAM prices. Consoles selling less is an example here. It's quite fascinating how deadly disruptive AI is now.
This really needs to have a lot more evidence that it’s because GitHub’s code is being written by AI vs them being bombarded by activity from all kinds of AI agents all over the world vs they were already on a trajectory of quality loss.
The 32GB issue is more about one internal factor: the wasteful reliance on Electron and other JS runtimes for UI, and two external factors: the very high price of RAM, and the increasing adoption of Linux.
So they will make Windows run on 8GB because people can't purchase cheap RAM anymore, and they want to stop people migrating to Linux.
This is not directly caused by AI slop, only indirectly through RAM prices.
