japhyr 7 hours ago | next |

There's a not-entirely-small part of me that hopes Issues breaks entirely for long enough that people at GitHub rethink their implementation.

GH issues have been so useful for the better part of a decade, that I have an empty repo called my_life just so I can make issues about things like home maintenance. In the last few months, the UI has become so slow and flaky that I don't use it for nearly as much as I used to. And when I have to for a project, it slows me down noticeably.

I thought I was alone in this, but asking around I found that this is a common frustration among developers I communicate regularly with.

simonw 7 hours ago | root | parent | next |

I do the same - I've been running so many non-software things out of private GitHub Issues. I even have a simple system for creating a new issue every day to use as a personal TODO list, described here: https://til.simonwillison.net/github-actions/daily-planner

I've noticed everything feeling a whole lot less snappy and responsive over the past few days - ironically I think it's because they've done a major rewrite of the frontend presumably with the aim of making it more snappy and responsive!

PapaPalpatine 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I’m low-key certain it’s because they started using more React on the front end, especially for the new Issue stuff. The entire UI feels slow and janky like GitLab.

straws 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

You're not alone. There's been an effort to transparently update the UI to a React implementation over the past year or two, and while I understand the benefits to that approach, they have introduced some flakiness in moving away from a the server-rendered pjax/html-pipeline/simple web components approach that was so cohesive and battle tested over the decade before it.

jrochkind1 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I am not experiencing a full outage right now, but I am experiencing very slow (spinner) and flakey (error that works again on repeat).

So perhaps it's the same problem, that's been getting more prevalent until it was noticeable by monitoring. One can hope!

RohMin 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

That's actually a really interesting way to leverage that feature. Have you found this easier than other services built specifically for this use case?

japhyr 7 hours ago | root | parent |

I've tried other tools. But I'm on GitHub most days, so it's been a seamless way to keep track of some things that would otherwise disappear into a calendar, or some tool that I don't use as often.

bigfatfrock 7 hours ago | prev | next |

Who's going to kick off the holy war around self hosting?

reddalo 7 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Speaking of self hosting, Codeberg [1] is great. It's open and it looks and behaves pretty much like GitHub (unlike GitLab).

[1] https://codeberg.org/

diggan 7 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Seconded. Hosting FOSS on a platform that isn't FOSS itself and run by a for-profit company who tried to work against FOSS for so long (Microsoft) doesn't make much sense to me.

Instead, we should dogfood the FOSS ecosystem on a platform that is FOSS itself, and run as a non-profit. Codeberg, for better or worse, is the best platform for this today.

mr_mitm 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

Did you mean to say Forgejo? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Codeberg is simply hosting a Forgejo instance for you, so not exactly self hosting.

skydhash 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Personal projects are on a vps and accessed through ssh. I’ve self-hosted gitea, then forgejo, then found out that I don’t like the interface or the auth dance. My plan is to ise cgit if I want something to be public and any forge if the purpose is collaboration (sourcehut is nice)

duxup 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Honestly, sounds like a lot of work and I'm not sure I get much benefit, or even less downtime.

I don't know about others but for me github is hardly a service that I'm sweating moment to moment uptime. My apps are still running and so on.

rvz 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

It all began 5 years ago [0] when we wanted to 'centralize everything to GitHub.'

Then, the outages accelerated from there.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

mrguyorama 6 hours ago | root | parent |

"are you sure your self-hosted solution will have better uptime?"

Hilariously, after 15 years working in self hosted bitbucket systems, YES entirely.

An underfunded university with an incompetent but doing their best IT department? Zero downtime.

A mid sized company full of overly confident and "just build it" nerds building fragile shit? Zero downtime.

A large corporation with a completely outsourced IT department that can't give you access to something unless you do exactly the right undocumented thing in our internal ticketing software? Zero downtime.

That includes self hosted jenkins and literally homebuilt infrastructure with zero documentation and the guy that built it left a while ago.

I have never been able to blame our build and code infra for lack of productivity.

peterldowns 7 hours ago | prev | next |

I'm seeing issues with repo pages entirely (getting Unicorn "We couldn't respond to your request in time" errors) but the status page hasn't updated to show that yet.

cjonas 7 hours ago | prev | next |

Bitbucket was down for a few hours a week ago and 0 fuss was made about it in the media. Atlassian stock actually went up over the ourage

diggan 7 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Besides projects/companies/people stuck on Bitbucket, is anyone actually voluntary using Bitbucket? I remember using it back when I was poor and it was the only choice for hosted free private repositories, but the rest of the platform was actively worse in basically every way compared to the alternatives.

G1N 7 hours ago | prev | next |

They're saying PRs and issues but I can't access github.com or github oauth for logging into external services. Need to migrate our org off of using github auth for anything critical I think, this is twice so far this year that we've had these issues.

lawrjone 7 hours ago | prev | next |

The industry made a general decision after ZIRP ended to deprioritise availability after years of historic levels of engineering investment.

It's no surprise we're now feeling those effects but damn, GitHub and other services like Slack have been really bad lately.

diggan 7 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Or, GitHub used to favor stability back in the day, and there wasn't a lot of changes. People were complaining that GitHub didn't "improve" enough day-to-day, so after the Microsoft purchase, Microsoft started forcing GitHub to add more features, stability be damned.

Most outages are caused not by stuff just randomly breaking, but updates/upgrades going wrong. If you try to increase the output of new features/changes to a platform, you're bound to have more outages and downtime if you aren't more careful than before.

Microsoft, who never really excelled at engineering, to the surprise of absolutely everyone, choose adding features over stability and since years back, we're seeing the consequences of that choice.

lawrjone 7 hours ago | root | parent |

I'm not totally certain you can attribute it to this. I know there's a bunch of work going on to migrate things into Azure after the MS acquisition but it feels like more of an industry trend that we cut engineering spend at the cost (often) of lower quality output and outages like these.

GitHub laid off 10% of their staff in 2023 and like you say, won't have slowed down to account for that.

Ignoring all that though... other than Copilot, what big feature changes have you seen in GitHub? My experience of using their product has been broadly unchanged for years.

diggan 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

> My experience of using their product has been broadly unchanged for years.

Compared to how fast/slow they were moving 2012-2018, they're moving at blazing speed now. It feels like every time I open GitHub now, there are new features/changes and "Beta" available stuff. The platform is almost completely different today than it was in 2018, for better or worse.

NewJazz 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

Citation needed?

Is this true beyond github and slack? Both were acquired btw, that could explain their availability issues (just like twitter, now X).

What about e.g. AWS or GCP? Has their availability meaningfully reduced?

lawrjone 7 hours ago | root | parent |

I wouldn't say this applies to cloud providers, they have a very different business on their hands.

But for SaaS in general I think the trend is noticeable? Twitter led the way with massive layoffs in engineering often in the roles around reliability. The industry as a whole have aimed to cut costs however possible, and reliability/ops is usually seen as a cost-centre that gets hit hard.

I've watched this in my own space (start/scale-ups and larger companies, I work in incident response tooling) as people start talking very differently about reliability and engineering investment. You hear "do more with less" about five times every day and spend that was previously greenlit by default around reliability/redundancy is under much more scrutiny now.

I see this as a silent mirror of the reduction in open-source efforts from companies now there's been a refocus on business impact and bottom-line.

hedora 7 hours ago | prev | next |

The last few days, the “create pr” screen kept hanging for me. I figured out I could reload it, click “create”, grab a coffee, and then come back and it’d be at the next screen.

Maybe it’s time to learn their CLI (and then patiently wait for work to switch to another git service).

shafyy 7 hours ago | prev | next |

I feel like it's not only GitHub... Slack is very slow, too.

smitelli 7 hours ago | root | parent |

I've been getting a couple generic Cloudflare 521 responses across a weird mix of big and not-big sites this morning. Things have felt a little off.

rnicholus 7 hours ago | prev | next |

I honestly can't believe how unreliable Github is. Outages are commonplace. It boggles my mind how nothing has been done to address the reliability regressions that have been creeping in ever since MS took over.

rcleveng 7 hours ago | prev | next |

even the main github.com page seems down for me now (also getting the unicorn that others saw on their repo)

cristaloleg 7 hours ago | prev | next |

Yep, PRs and Issues are affected https://www.githubstatus.com/

ahofmann 7 hours ago | prev | next |

In a universe, where Obi-Wan Kenobi is a developer: "I felt a great disturbance in the workflow, as if millions of requests suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

tovej 7 hours ago | prev | next |

It's not just PRs and issues, my build systems are breaking because I can't download tarballs for dependencies from github.

flyinghamster 7 hours ago | root | parent |

One thing I started doing a few years ago is that, any time I check out a git repo, whether it's on github or anywhere else, is clone it to my NAS and then clone from there to whatever I'm building it on. Aside from guarding against losing dependencies to outages (or from being yanked), it can be handy for guarding against my own fat fingers, and for making sure that the same version is running on multiple systems.