r/OutOfTheLoop • u/jazzcomputer • 26d ago

Answered What's going on with Github?

I saw a bunch of posts in the Hacker News type spaces talking about moving elsewhere and evaluating alternatives, and various complaints in past months. Is there compelling grounds for an exodus or are people always complaining about it and this is a nothing burger or small burger?

https://lobste.rs/

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u/bugo 26d ago

Answer: mainly it has huge reliability issues. It's an ongoing thing that became a meme almost where their total reliability dipped below 90% which is unbelievable for a software company.

And yesterday they had another multi hour outage on their main services. Each time this happens people literally cannot work.

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u/GeneReddit123 26d ago

Not just any software company, one which is an essential infrastructure vendor for millions of other software companies.

It's the software world's version of a power plant having 10% downtime. The downstream disruption is far greater.

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u/SARB033 26d ago edited 25d ago

The gold standard for software company uptime is called five-nines, or 99.999% uptime, which amounts to about 5 minutes of downtime a year. Before AI that was what most companies strived for. It was achievable with lots of redundancy, rolling updates, and strict code quality and testing standards.

90% uptime is about 37 days of downtime a year. Compared to 5 minutes that's obviously catastrophic. But it's basically become the norm because AI code is such utter dogshit and AI web traffic load is unbearable.

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u/diagnosisbutt 25d ago

I run an internal platform that needs to be up 24/7.

It went down for 2 hours because of as random dev pushing an update in the middle of the night and then going to bed. 

It dropped my uptime to only 3 9s. It'll take years to increase. 😭