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Comment by herpdyderp | Hacker News Reader

non-helpful answer: the "Microsoft Acquires GitHub" line in this graph answers all questions https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

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Note that most of the downtime in that graph comes from Github Actions, which simply didn't exist before the Microsoft acquisition.

The downtime also starts happening in 2020, which is a while after the acquisition. 2020 was the year many people started learning to code while being stuck at home.

To be fair, before the aquisition, GitHub was super stable, but also it felt like they rarely changed or added anything.

After Microsoft acquired them, they started rolling out new features at an incredible pace. And if you look at the breakdown of the downtime, most of the downtime is in features that didn't exist before the acquisition.

Though not all of the downtime is in new features. The core is also less stable than ever.

But I just want stable hosting for my shit. I barely even interact with the web UI, other than commenting on PRs.

Unfortunately there isn't as much money to be made¹² serving people who just want a stable host for basic repos. The money comes from the paid accounts, and those do tend to want the extra features - even if the end users don't the management agreeing to the spend will see value in the integration³ of other parts of the development/release/support processes. The problem is they all want a different mix of features, meaning that the feature set needs to be wide to capture as much interest as possible especially in light of competitors that may offer something you don't (yet).

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[1] Possibly none, are you paying for a pro or enterprise account?

[2] There will be a little indirect income perhaps, via deriving value from tracking users and being able to use the combined content for various analytics (including lately AI training).

[3] Potentially reducing the cost/complexity of integrating disparate systems⁴, themselves.

[4] Sometimes in-house developed systems that might distract key devs from the company's products/services that they can sell.

My (actuarial) read on this is that pre-Microsoft GitHub acknowledged that the complexity inherent in their technology stack imparted a lot of change risk, and that probably informed their decisions around shipping new features.

My (not-so-actuarial 1990's-experience-colored) feeling is that this is Microsoft doing what Microsoft does best, namely including a lot of seemingly compelling features in a product to get people hooked and to keep competitors in a position of trying to keep up.

> To be fair, before the acquisition, GitHub was super stable

Having been through a couple of acquisitions (as a cog in the machine being acquired, not a founder or purchaser or such), the last one at the end of 2025, and seen others as an unofficial close observer via friends/family, I think this is quite normal. No matter how thorough the due diligence and other investigations are pre-purchase, there will usually be an information gathering time before any significant changes are made. Even without that there are a couple of months being very careful not to rock the boat too much, so as to not put the willies up shareholders and key human resources. The first significant changes often won't happen for 3-to-6 months, unless part of the reason for the acquisition is that the company was on the verge of failing or was growing too fast to cope. During that time, unless key people jump ship early forcing change to an extent, things below certain management levels are much more business-as-usual than you might expect.

Nobody wants to trade stability for feature, especially for a product like Github...

This is no excuse. Prioritizing new features so far above reliability is exactly what makes most Microsoft products infuriating to use.

In all fairness, the features expanded substantially after the acquisition so there's are a lot more components that can experience downtime. Pre-acquisition, github was a fairly simple code repository with issues bolted on. Actions, Dependabot, Codespaces, Advanced Security, Package Registry, Copilot, etc. all came after the acquisition and probably involve much more overhead than what github was prior to the acquisition. It basically went from code hosting platform where machines are sitting idle when pushes and pulls aren't happening to a fully integrated developer ecosystem. Any one of those things experiencing degraded performance is going to show up on an uptime chart.

True, but you could argue whether these were good product decisions especially given they've probably contributed to the cost of running the platform and the instability substantially.

(Github did probably want a native CI implementation but I'm not really sure Actions was the way to do it. It seems so needlessly complex to me, not to mention the massive security issues. The rest of those features are just far from something I'd ever use so I don't even really know how to comment on them)

I dunno. Those features are valuable to somebody. Probably enterprise and government, which is where the money is. They basically get a full stack - and if we're being honest, it's actually pretty damn good aside from the downtime - from one vendor and that's important. The Universal Blue people have done some interesting things with Actions too. I guess if you don't need any of that stuff it's an easy migration for you. I'm in that boat. I switched to Forgejo and there's nothing I miss. Even that's overkill for my use case.

TBH I looked at forgejo as an alternative to Gitlab and the fact that they had cloned Actions is what persuaded me to drop it. IMO Gitlab's CI has been their killer feature for a while.

Microsoft acquiring GitHub is not a valid root cause analysis explaining Github’s degraded SLA.

Mmmm - I don't do root cause analysis for free. Best I can do is correlation.

According to that graph, performance drops widely after Microsoft's acquisition before AI enters the scene. If not Microsoft, how else do you explain it, or is the graph somehow misleading?

You're the one making the argument! You need to show causality instead of correlation.

I've made no argument at all. I'm asking a question to a person who made the claim that "Microsoft acquiring GitHub is not a valid root cause analysis."

No they don’t? They don’t need to do anything. It’s a forum, not a formal debate performance

it's just inaccurate data prior to microsft acq

I’ve noticed the same thing with computers, whenever I install MS windows on them uptime tanks ;)

On the other hand I think usage increased and GitHub operates now at a different scale.

Seems to be a pattern that infra teams in and around Azure don't know how to deal with age-of-AI levels of demand and struggle when internal politics + technical hubris get in the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

Microsoft acquires GitHub and subsequently moves all infrastructure to Azure

No one hates msft more than me, but there’s no way you think this one data point is useful to explain anything at all

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