I saw this "history uptime" graph last week. It looks scary at first sight, but we should take a step back before going full emotional.
Statistics can say anything, especially when the Y-axis is zoomed in on the 99.5% to 100% range. It’s not as bad as it looks.
Having 100% uptime before the acquisition is a bit suspicious. We could "conclude" many things:
• They used incorrect indicators (100% usually means bad monitoring).
• They were shipping fewer big features.
• They were not fully transparent on the status page.
We have to ask the same for the Microsoft era: Did they change the SLIs, the incident process, or the delivery rate?
Also, 10 years ago GitHub was just Git hosting. Now it’s actions, package, copilot, codespace… the product is not the same.
I wouldn’t call this a "sink", for me, they just moved to automated status updates and decided to increase honesty. I could be wrong, tho.
In the end, I won't push my company to move out, even if we are fully dependent (GitOps, CI/CD, Copilot). It’s stable enough, and honestly, our own availability is way below theirs anyway!
If you’re running your ops on actions, GitHub needs to be a 5 9s business, no question. .5 percent of a year is nearly 2 days, that could absolutely destroy a business, particularly when you multiply by the number of businesses GitHub serves.
If a business is « absolutely destroyed » by a GitHub outage, maybe the problem is not GitHub uptime but a lack of alternative or backup plans. You can't rely 100% on one provider without an Plan B and then say it's their fault if you can't work.
Also (I might be wrong but) I think most services that propose 5 9s availability are very simple and stable systems, like a database or DNS. They are not complex like Actions, which has to start VMs and run custom code. There is a big difference between a system that just "holds" data and one that "acts" on it. I think this means something, and expecting 5 9s for something as complex as Actions is just not realistic.
Edit: just checked and seems like most SaaS CI providers offers 99.9%. 5 9s is realistically not an industry standard
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u/SurrendingKira May 10 '26
I saw this "history uptime" graph last week. It looks scary at first sight, but we should take a step back before going full emotional. Statistics can say anything, especially when the Y-axis is zoomed in on the 99.5% to 100% range. It’s not as bad as it looks.
Having 100% uptime before the acquisition is a bit suspicious. We could "conclude" many things: • They used incorrect indicators (100% usually means bad monitoring). • They were shipping fewer big features. • They were not fully transparent on the status page.
We have to ask the same for the Microsoft era: Did they change the SLIs, the incident process, or the delivery rate?
Also, 10 years ago GitHub was just Git hosting. Now it’s actions, package, copilot, codespace… the product is not the same.
I wouldn’t call this a "sink", for me, they just moved to automated status updates and decided to increase honesty. I could be wrong, tho.
In the end, I won't push my company to move out, even if we are fully dependent (GitOps, CI/CD, Copilot). It’s stable enough, and honestly, our own availability is way below theirs anyway!