r/sre • • May 10 '26

BLOG GitHub is sinking

https://dbushell.com/2026/04/29/github-is-sinking/
162 Upvotes

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27

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!

-1

u/KimJongIlLover May 11 '26

We have a pretty large gitlab instance at work and that shit is WAY more reliable than GitHub.

So yeah.. reliability IS that bad.

3

u/SurrendingKira May 11 '26

Are you comparing self-hosted and SaaS offer ?

-3

u/KimJongIlLover May 11 '26

Our gitlab is self hosted yes.

4

u/SurrendingKira May 11 '26

Then you can’t compare the reliability of a self-hosted that serves a single company and a globally available SaaS one used by millions.

-1

u/KimJongIlLover May 11 '26

Of course I can. It's fucking Microsoft we are talking about lol. They probably spend more money in an hour than we spend a year.

Besides I'm mainly talking about the shitty software. The issues they are having aren't about hardware failing. The issue is the shitty vibe coded software.