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Comment by zombination | Hacker News Reader

This is important evidence for our government. It'll be interesting to see how they respond to these attacks -- attacks by a nation state against key United States Internet infrastructure.

It seems a bit of a stretch to say that Github is "key US Internet infrastructure"...

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I don't know that it is "key US Internet infrastructure", but it's important to a lot of developers and companies. Thankfully GitHub handled the attack pretty well.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure what actual usage stats are like for GitHub.

If GitHub were down for two days that's a metric shitload of projects that can't get deployed. There's a significant number of software projects with dependencies on Github-hosted stuff.

If github were down for two days, you're probably right, those projects can't be deployed.

But if github were down for two months, the nature of git suggests that deployment for those many individual projects would shift either to the originators' infrastructure, or some other aggregating service.

This is true but very limited as well. GitHub isn't used for just git now, it's also an issue tracker, a wiki (yes, those are repos as well, but you don't usually have them sync'd), Github-only services (e.g. Travis), package managers (e.g. Cocoapods and Crates).

There is a lot riding on GitHub that developers use. Hell, even closed-source companies sometimes use empty GitHub repos so they can use Issues for openly available tracking.

Isn't GitHub hosted on AWS, which as a platform is pretty significant.

GitHub used to be hosted on EngineYard in the beginning, but later moved to bare metal servers at RackSpace: https://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace

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