YHK - yet another hacker news clone

GitHub Down Again?

95 points ridowk 1 hour ago 88 comments

ridowk 1 hour ago | parent

Their status page (lol) says it's working (https://www.githubstatus.com/) but i get a 504 time-out when trying to access repositories

mrshu 1 hour ago | parent

A big part of the reason why https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ happened

wartijn_ 50 minutes ago | parent

That page isn't more useful right now, it isn't showing any outage right now, but I can't view the source code, because of an active GitHub outage.

alpaca128 37 minutes ago | parent

That page being hosted on github seems like an interesting choice.

shimms 1 hour ago | parent

They seem to be having an issue with release downloads (https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/212407).

Our CI is broken at the moment, unable to download tools used in various checks (gitleaks, etc).

lifeisloving 48 minutes ago | parent

Why dont companies host their own CI anyways.. Its really not that complicated. I see companies spending 20k a month on github actions.. It makes no sense to me.

clivedup 44 minutes ago | parent

The opportunity cost is higher.

shimms 16 minutes ago | parent

We migrated to GitLab a while back, and run Buildkite for CI.

Our public mirrors for open source stuff that results in built binaries that we ship is built on GitHub Actions from the public GitHub mirror so we have build attestation from the source.

Sometimes you're just dependent on things.

DishyDev 1 hour ago | parent

Yep same, looks like another outage

countWSS 1 hour ago | parent

Can't see commit pages.

Kholin 1 hour ago | parent

> 504 Gateway Time-out

> The server didn't respond in time.

alfiedotwtf 1 hour ago | parent

504 for the past hour, status says all green

Kholin 1 hour ago | parent

Still got 504 if I'm not logged in

fragmede 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting to see the black text on white background page.

dom96 1 hour ago | parent

Works for me

BoingBoomTschak 1 hour ago | parent

Just another day in "Azure code", I guess.

Brajeshwar 1 hour ago | parent

We seem to be seeing `Github Down` pretty regularly but that seems to be mostly the public facing ones. In the last one year that I have been using Enterprise Github regularly, I don't remember it being down anytime.

beberlei 1 hour ago | parent

Hosted or even cloud?

bagels 1 hour ago | parent

It's been down for >30 minutes. Status page of course says everything is fine. 504 when downloading releases, so CI and Terraform don't work.

faangguyindia 1 hour ago | parent

Github being host on Azure, this is really bad PR for their cloud and technical prowess.

cube00 1 hour ago | parent

> this is really bad PR

No such thing as bad PR these days, 24 hours later and we're on to the next thing, that's assuming people even saw it in their doom scroll feed. Gone are the days when everyone watches the same TV news or reads the same newspaper.

bonesss 1 hour ago | parent

I'm just confused how we can be in an industry where "<shrug> what's the alternative, just buy MS and live with it" is making a strong comeback simultaneously as all the big tech giants, MS included, are telling us we can generate infinite code and cloud configuration for a reasonable per-token price.

Amazon og Google or OpenAI having a one-click port of Githubs daily experience and Githubs CI infrastructure seems like it would be a pretty straightforward proof-of-AI-concept for a critical audience.

bagels 57 minutes ago | parent

Every Github outage is one more shove in the direction of me taking my org off of github.

pluc 30 minutes ago | parent

That's the cult of Microsoft for you. They have always been an average to below average company but have benefited from incredible openness from its customers because for the longest time they were perceived as the only option. Their real product is Microsoft

Microsoft of today isn't a leader in anything they're not the only ones in.

JanneVee 1 hour ago | parent

504 from Firefox not logged in and works from Safari which is logged in. CDN error perhaps?

ipsum2 1 hour ago | parent

I have an agent automatically commit code hundreds of times to a private repo every day. sorry for contributing to the ddos.

jhgkblv 1 hour ago | parent

seriously, what do you guys need to finally get off github? being on github is a huge liability these days.

Lucasoato 1 hour ago | parent

Solid open source alternatives?

JoshStrobl 1 hour ago | parent

Forgejo is a solid open source alternative.

ridowk 1 hour ago | parent

The issue isn't about us, but there are a lot of projects that are happening on github. I wanted to take a look at the sources of a random lib when i realized it was down, it wasn't about hosting some of my stuff

matkoniecz 1 hour ago | parent

Why it is liability?

AyanamiKaine 1 hour ago | parent

Man, it happens more and more that I can’t work because nix can’t fetch something from git or my elixir build fails because it needs to fetch a release from GitHub.

Even if I change my CI to something else, all the dependencies depend on GitHub (Not like there exists a cheap/free alternative where nix packages could be hosted ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

esFran 1 hour ago | parent

I'd recommend the free (as in freedom) Git alternative to everyone: Codeberg. Super lightweight, without that vicious circle of knowing your code is being used to train AI. Free for hobby projects, and reasonably viable for professional ones.

Muhammad523 1 hour ago | parent

You're now my friend just because you said "free as in freedom"

PalmPilotProMax 1 hour ago | parent

Join us now and share the software;

You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free~~~

aurareturn 1 hour ago | parent

People who migrate away from Github, what makes you think they're more reliable? All Git services are prone to massive surges in commit volume due to AI agents. At least if Github goes down, your boss is not going to blame you.

I'd rather stay in Github and maybe use another service purely as backup.

atiedebee 1 hour ago | parent

Codeberg specifically has a policy against projects that are maintained heavily with AI tooling, so I don't think they would have that problem.

pixelesque 58 minutes ago | parent

Their uptime's not exactly great either though:

https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg

aurareturn 16 minutes ago | parent

Which funny enough is lesser than Github: https://www.githubstatus.com/

I'd much rather stay with Github than a small provider.

Shorel 1 hour ago | parent

Their terms of service forbid AI agents or even AI created code to be submitted there.

hagbard_c 1 hour ago | parent

> I'd rather stay in Github and maybe use another service purely as backup.

Swap those two and you're on the right track. I think the best way to use GH is as a mirror for a self-hosted git instance, with or without web frontend. It gives you the reach of GH with the, dare I say it, reliability of self-hosted. It also gives you the chance to keep things off GH which you don't want to be there. Keep the self-hosted instance private for most things, use GH links for public access. When GH is down again you can always give people (temporary) access to your self-hosted instance if the need arrives.

Lapel2742 1 hour ago | parent

> All Git services are prone to massive surges in commit volume due to AI agents.

You are probably wrong on that.

> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).

https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...

aurareturn 18 minutes ago | parent

  You are probably wrong on that.
I don't think I'm. If another Git service gets popular, they too will experience surges and go down often.

If Github truly becomes unreliable and people migrate to this niche service en mass, they'll ignore their no AI coding policy.

dutchbart 1 hour ago | parent

No, not free as in freedom. LLM-assisted coding is prohibited and everything MUST be open-source. So not viable for all (hobby) projects.

vrighter 1 hour ago | parent

free as in freedom for humans. machines neither want nor need freedom

aabhay 1 hour ago | parent

Speak for yourself

vrighter 51 minutes ago | parent

i spoke for nobody. neither myself nor you or anyone else. and machines can't speak or hold opinions, so i can't speak for them either

Shish2k 57 minutes ago | parent

I wonder how much internet-argument bandwidth would be saved if we used different words for "freedom from" vs "freedom to", instead of putting both things on a single scale and then arguing over which is "more free"...

1718627440 48 minutes ago | parent

It's a matter of perspective and what you perceive to be the default. Freedom from prevention of X is Freedom to not do X.

philipallstar 35 minutes ago | parent

Machines are tools used by humans. Codeberg has banned a certain class of tool used by humans.

vrighter 25 minutes ago | parent

as is their right, and the wish of a very significant chunk of their users. you're still free to use other platforms.

bheztio 13 minutes ago | parent

So if I'm not free to use a hammer, that's actually not a constriction of my freedom because "the hammer neither wants nor needs freedom"?

otabdeveloper4 1 hour ago | parent

Okay, what's the downside tho?

Hendrikto 1 hour ago | parent

Restricting user freedom.

dizhn 1 hour ago | parent

I love and use Forgejo which they are both running and now developing within their ecosystem but development is so slow and such basic things are missing that one cannot help but think perhaps they should get some LLM assistance. At this rate they are very likely to end up a historical footnote.

lexicality 1 hour ago | parent

What's missing?

dizhn 43 minutes ago | parent

One example Projects (boards). I would not necessarily call it missing for my own use case but it might as well not exist in its current state.

Label management is a mess too with almost no ease of use features. Lots of clicking when prior art already exists elsewhere.

Federation is another thing that's supposed to happen but isn't.

Action runners I like actually but their web UI is really confusing.

API is missing a lot of endpoints too. (Pretty straight forward for AI agents to work on as "good first issue")

No machine users or management of the same via Administrator. If you want to have a bot (not necessarily AI) you need to create a user with a hard to guess password and manage it by actually logging in as that user.

Another user will probably have their own set of things that matter to them.

As I've already said above, I do use it and love it but sort of half hoped Gitea would have proceeded farther since Forgejo forked away. It hasn't.

OneDev looks much more capable on surface to me today but I have not used it extensively yet and it has some features not included in the self hosted version. Not as much as open core projects but some.

matkoniecz 1 hour ago | parent

Why you think that code from Codeberg is not used to train LLMs?

(You are not required to agree for such use in tos, but it will be used anyway)

(Not by Codeberg operators, to be clear)

roenxi 1 hour ago | parent

Hosted services can't really be "free as in freedom". We can't know for sure what software they're actually running and users don't have any freedom in using their service since that is entirely at their pleasure. For something to be free the thing has to be able to move beyond its present controller.

1718627440 47 minutes ago | parent

Isn't that the case fro AGPL? You have the control over the source code and can change it, even if the current instance is not in your control.

alpaca128 41 minutes ago | parent

TOS are not protection against scraping. Is there any reason to not assume by default that Codeberg gets used for training just like every other online collection of content?

mejutoco 40 minutes ago | parent

git --bare init

and some discipline can go a long way.

BoingBoomTschak 31 minutes ago | parent

Codeberg has its own issues with anti-scraping measures often impacting (not just annoying) users or some deep ideological bias; and I'm not talking about LLM/open source, which I agree with.

raincole 30 minutes ago | parent

> that vicious circle of knowing your code is being used to train AI

There is no such circle. If you put your work in public, it has been used to train AI. That's it.

mkagenius 1 hour ago | parent

Why doesn't https://www.githubstatus.com reflect this accurately?

I usually check this and then doubt my network might be at fault if they don't show outages.

skissane 1 hour ago | parent

I think that page only displays outages if some manager at GitHub decides it is "sufficiently major" to display there.

GitHub has outages all the time without that page showing anything.

Another comment pointed to a third party alternative which is more accurate – https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ – but that alternative isn't showing an outage right now either, since I believe it is being fed by GitHub.com's incident data.

mrshu 1 hour ago | parent

> I believe it is being fed by GitHub.com's incident data.

This is indeed correct.

skissane 40 minutes ago | parent

Now https://www.githubstatus.com/ is declaring an incident but your page doesn’t have it

Maybe I spoke too soon in labelling your page “more accurate”?

adrian_b 1 hour ago | parent

Yes githubstatus shows all OK for Europe, where I am, but when trying to open the Web page of a repository I receive:

  503 Service Unavailable

  No server is available to handle this request.

hurfdurf 46 minutes ago | parent

Same here. What's the point of a status page at this stage? "Copilot Ali"?

bheztio 16 minutes ago | parent

They updated the status page now, it says they are "investigating degraded performance". Like, their web is 100 % down. But no, have to call it "degraded performance for some users, some services" etc.

egorfine 38 minutes ago | parent

It never does.

chilli_axe 1 hour ago | parent

Seems to be back now.

skissane 1 hour ago | parent

I just tried again, my GitHub actions jobs are still getting 503 errors from GitHub API

mat0 1 hour ago | parent

Yes. It is incredibly frustrating that everything is hosted on GitHub nowadays. I wanted to install Bazzite (a Linux distro!) and I cannot download their ISO, I cannot download their recommended partition tool, I cannot even download Rufus to start formatting some drives. And then you go and check their status page and you get the "all good nothing wrong here". So annoying

fock 1 hour ago | parent

"well, who would not have the internet!"

(the anduril-type folks using nix for high-assurance setups!)

Gander5739 34 minutes ago | parent

You could torrent it from https://fosstorrents.com/distributions/bazzite/

borisgolovnev 1 hour ago | parent

Regular reminder that if you just need a remote to collaborate with others and don't need stars commit graphs and all that social coding aspects, you can just host your git repo yourself on any cheap VPS.

exploraz 1 hour ago | parent

504 gateway timeout only when logged-out. Authenticated access seems to be normal at my side.

czarek_pl 1 hour ago | parent

I read recently that number of commits on github platform increased 5 times over the year - their infrastructure is under heavy load. It's due to AI revolution. Stay tuned to see 5x more features in your favorite apps. Great times are coming :-)

geniium 1 hour ago | parent

funny yo post a github down again (?) with a link pointing to github.com

gnegggh 1 hour ago | parent

currently trying to get out of my GitHub "enterprise" plan. Waiting patiently for the required support ticket to see if that is possible

solyin 1 hour ago | parent

Oh man it's really struggling.

renehsz 33 minutes ago | parent

I'm surprised they even reach 1 nine of uptime (according to [1]), it certainly feels worse than that.

Maybe it would be better to measure uptime not as what percentage of time the site is up, but instead as how likely a randomly selected visitor is to be able to access the site.

That would adjust for the fact that the window of peak demand, e.g. the US workday, which is when Github tends to go down, is also when people need the service the most.

[1]: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

gib444 31 minutes ago | parent

My algorithm has not needed an update for a while:

  def is_github_down(day):
      return day[-1] == "y"
It does have a flaw though where if you are shouting, it returns some false hope.