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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

Name one thing Microsoft didn't run into the ground post-acquisition

hey now, LinkedIn was terrible before Microsoft.

Java or Bedrock edition, and have you tried logging into your EntraID Microsoft Teams for Xbox account lately? Make sure to check the box to keep you logged in!

Last I heard UK Minecraft players aren't even allowed to talk anymore without ID verification.

And if someone makes a server that doesn't do the chat verification, Microsoft blacklists that server in the client-side server address textbox. This system was developed to destroy pay-to-win servers, but they're now applying it against servers that refuse to censor "fuck".

Not as bad as it is now. All I see are suggested posts from people I never connected with and those are full of instagramesque self-promoting banal vibes.

TBH, even LinkedIn seemed to provide me with posts advertising events that happened two weeks ago a bit less pre-acquisition.

GH was acquired by microsoft some eight years ago. It has been working quite well until recently.

People may have had complaints about functionality, features, commercial issues, but the thing used to at least have a decent uptime until recently.

It also used to be run as an independent company with access to MS's resources.

Now it's a unit in their AI hype machine.

MSFT was pretty arms length for the first 5-6 years. I was honestly kind of impressed and it made my opinion of MSFT better. But then AI made it too attractive of a target and MSFT couldn't help but make it a place the former CEO wanted to leave (and it has been running headless for about a year now).

It's quite disappointing objectively, but I expected worse from MSFT.

Has nothing to do with Microsoft acquisition... AI usage has increased demand and load. More PRs, more Action runners, more of everything firing. GitHub just wasn't ready for the scale and are now having issues catching up with it as it continues to increase exponentially.

Yeah, that and Microsoft has been slow to move the infrastructure to something that scales better to handle that load.

The more surpassing part is that Microsoft hasn't figured out a way to manage/contain the AI-sourced traffic better so it doesn't create all this noisy neighbor problems for non-AI usage/users.

Github's core platform doesn't really make that separation, anything a human can leverage on github an AI agent can as well, just faster and with heavier usage. End of day agents and humans are using the same services.

Sure, still need to enable access the same info but feels like bucketing the clients into

bucket1 = clients that were working just fine before (users and whatever automation they had in place) bucket2 = ai clients that contributed to, if not flat out caused, the scale problems

then slowing down/limiting the bucket2 clients while keeping the bucket1 clients rolling as-is, is both doable and keeps existing customers happy while the underlying infra gets scale/perf improvements needed to support ai clients at scale.

MSFT is also forcing its subsidiaries to “lean into AI” so that they can fire people to cover for Satya’s bad investments

This is a convenient lie that GH likes to tell. Growth is nothing like exponential, its at most 300% over several years according to their own public numbers (presented misleadingly on graphs)

But a couple of years ago they were crowing about how much work they were doing to prepare for “a billion developers”. If they had actually done that then the actual load from agents should have been no problem.

Is this growth in resource usage or growth in revenue? Because those numbers aren't necessarily coupled. I.e most action runners are free

usage

There was an x post in another thread under this post that showed all the standard usage numbers are way up: 14x, 2.1x, etc. And the OP hinted at the usage growth being non-linear for 2026

Are you sure? Seems like they "completed" a migration about the same time all these problems started to become daily. https://www.theverge.com/tech/796119/microsoft-github-azure-...

> It has been working quite well until recently.

I'm not sure how reliable the data is, but average uptime seems to have dipped measurably starting within a year of the aquisition, according to https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

They moved to Azure. Nothing improves on Azure.

FWIW, I'm not convinced that chart is necessarily an accurate representation of pre-acquisition reality. It would really surprise me if GitHub did not have a single sev-0 pre-acquisition, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were not formally captured and reported in a format that would make its way into their current status page's database.

I think Minecraft is still in good shape

I wouldn't know, somehow this game I bought maybe 15 years ago is no longer playable for me, my account was supposed to be migrated from Mojang to Microsoft or similar, but then that never happened or something, and trying to login now asks me to contact Microsoft support, which I've tried 3-4 times, never had anyone respond to me so who knows how the game is today? I stopped trying at this point...

Personally, once a game I own is janked from my hands because of organizational decisions, that's the time I'll stop consider the game "in good shape", but I'm sure the people who had to buy the same game a second time still enjoy it.

Yes, the account migration was a mess. Support response times were at least 30 days, if you ever actually received a response at all (I never did). I did buy the game a second time in order to play with my kids.

They deleted my account from 2010 because I didn't convert it to a Microsoft one. They baked an incredibly aggressive chat filter into multiplayer, even if you're not playing on official servers. They've added microtransactions for things that we previously free (skins, resource packs). They force you into their shitty, bloated, user-hostile launcher with adverts.

It's been nonstop content-slop since the acquisition. New mobs, new blocks, new items, new blocks, new items, new mobs, new mobs, new biomes. Some of them are good but the totality of adding a bunch of stuff has been to destroy the simplicity that was one of the draws of the original game. Now it's an exploration and niche-mechanics-exploitation game more than a virtual legos game. You don't go mining any more, you find trading loops with villagers.

This was happening to some degree pre-acquisition, but since the acquisition it's been this non-stop.

Some of it's good. The Nether and the oceans were really boring before their respective updates.

They should have called Minecraft "done" around the acquisition time and started on Minecraft 2.

Dave Cutler?

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