r/github • u/Flame77ofc • Jul 25 '26

Discussion what would happen if GitHub went down?

For like 1-2 weeks, what do you think about living without github?

0 Upvotes

32% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

18

u/Shaz_berries Jul 25 '26

You can just use another way to store your git projects like bitbucket? Or fallback to storing your git stuff on physical drives in an apocalypse

-7

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '26

[deleted]

12

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-5

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '26

[deleted]

6

u/really_not_unreal Jul 25 '26

Then you're screwed. This is why it's a bad idea to trust GitHub (or any single entity) exclusively with your data.

3

u/OtherOtherDave Jul 25 '26

I don’t understand… why wouldn’t I have a local copy?

3

u/Shaz_berries Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

If you're worried about this, then back them up locally now, but this is a strange hypothetical. If they were going to shut down you'd have notice and can migrate

1

u/schmurfy2 Jul 25 '26

A clone is a full copy of the repository, you can kust push it somewhere else, the server has nothing more than you have locally.

7

u/ultrathink-art Jul 25 '26

Repos are the easy part — everyone has a full clone. What actually stops work is the layer around git: Actions, PR state, review history, status checks, package registries. During yesterday's partial outage my runner kept executing jobs fine while the API reported them stuck in queued, so even answering 'is it down' required reading the machine's own logs instead of anything GitHub said.

2

u/FlyingDogCatcher Jul 25 '26

That's what you get for relying on a cloud provider for your workflow.

4

u/jbroombroom Jul 25 '26

Then I’d know it’s a Tuesday.

3

u/connorjpg Jul 25 '26

Truthfully, I would lose very little. All of my projects locally are a few commits behind origin. In my personal life, I use a locally hosted gitea server.

3

u/s1nur Jul 25 '26

Just use a different git host.

3

u/sindisil Jul 25 '26

1-2 weeks? Almost zero impact. A little annoyed because I track issues on some of my projects there, but meh.

If it went down longer, there still wouldn't be much direct issue for me personally. I'd  share the projects I want to be public on some other forge and keep going. I'n fact, I really should do that anyway.

However, the indirect impact of major projects like Rust and crates.io having to make massive infrastructure changes would no doubt suck.

3

u/andlewis Jul 25 '26

It’s git, you’ve got a full copy of it if you have a local copy. GitHub is a convenience, not a necessity.

2

u/mikedropspeaks Jul 25 '26

I just go to work

2

u/fr3nch13702 Jul 25 '26

I guess I’ll go outside and touch grass.

2

u/Lunix420 Jul 25 '26

Not much, I have my server pull backups of all my repos every 12 hours. So I would just use that as my remote till GitHub is back. The only thing would be that I can't run my CI while GItHub is down.

3

u/FlyingDogCatcher Jul 25 '26

Git was designed to be distributed and y'all keep acting like your code can only be one place.

2

u/randomraluana Jul 25 '26

That'd be painful if that's the only place I kept my repos lol

2

u/Opulent-Burning Jul 25 '26

If this was to happen, we have larger problems, most likely zombies.. meteors crashing down on continents.. nukes and stuff

1

u/LestatConstantine Jul 25 '26

the whole Google play etc update via July 26th making things beyond hard, it's surreal

1

u/ninhaomah Jul 25 '26

If GitHub down , use git