GitHub Incident with Actions, Pages, and Webhooks

(githubstatus.com)

110 points | by damontal 2 hours ago

22 comments

  • peri-cl 1 hour ago
    The shape of this HN duplicate detector actually works as a GitHub uptime chart:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=githubstatus.com

    It's driven by aggregated user complaints, so it's pretty high-quality. Comment counts are a proxy for "how bad was the outage" + "how long was the outage thread topical for".

    edit to add: Here's a scatterplot of the same,

    https://files.catbox.moe/hhfh4l.png

  • pksunkara 2 hours ago
    I think all they have to do is stop giving free CI to everyone and this reliability issue will be solved immediately.

    Disclaimer: I am building a code forge myself at https://juju.bi

    • oleg_antonyan 1 hour ago
      free CI on github is so ridiculously overpowered it's hard to believe they still provide it
      • MrDunham 1 hour ago
        I think it's brilliant. I'm now paying $30 per month for Github actions as a duo shop... it's freemium working the way it should. Give them the first hit and all.

        And yes, I need to optimize (and am), but they're already getting hundreds from little me. I even started going towards the CI doing browser walks, code tests, AI rework, etc. It saved me from having another dev machine.

        Great stuff, powerful as all heck, and once you see the power it was—for me—impossible NOT to think of 6 other uses and blow through the free CI tier.

        • NorthSouthNorth 39 minutes ago
          The thing is, once you start paying for it, then a service like blacksmith is so attractive and easy to replace gh, that it seems a no brainer. We swapped like 30-40 gh actions from gh runners to Blacksmith runners and cut our ci times by about 4x on almost all of our workflows. And all you do is auth their gh app and update an image tag.

          Especially if you can take advantage of the high vcpu runners, then you can get some really fast pipelines going (not affiliated w/ them, just an enjoyer).

    • willio58 1 hour ago
      I've heard this claimed dozens of times. I wonder if anyone at Github can confirm this theory and maybe give insight into why they haven't just done this?
      • tmpz22 1 hour ago
        Im guessing the lock-in is strong enough that they can eat the reputational hit while getting meaningful training data by subsidizing the free users.

        Github has a decade of positive reputation to deal out, I don't see Grok or OpenAI jumping in and competing with that.

        • StilesCrisis 57 minutes ago
          I wanted to set up a Cloudflare static page and all the tooling is completely designed around Github. If you want any other service, you have to roll it yourself.
          • cls59 35 minutes ago
            The official Cloudflare CLI can ship static site content with one command: "wrangler pages deploy"

            Easy enough to run from another CI or automated system.

        • dannyw 37 minutes ago
          I suspect the 1/4 (?) ownership by Microsoft plays a factor into OpenAI.

          Otherwise I reckon they’d have cloned GitHub already; possibly with a “Mirror to CodexHub? Free usage reset”.

    • m4rtink 1 hour ago
      Isn't that why most people are on GitHub in the first place ? Which then, Windows style eventually turns into people wanting to use GitHub also for company work, where the real money comes from for GitHub.

      Without free CI in GitHub, you might as well say:

      "they can just shut the whole thing down and this reliability issue will be solved immediately"

      • jjice 1 hour ago
        Maybe it is, but I know that lots of us used GitHub way before Actions launched. I think even if Actions wasn't free, GitHub would still have a massive advantage because it is the most well known place to host code, especially by less technical users (which is where I see a lot of finger pointing going with the increase in GitHub usage).

        I would not be surprised if a serious amount of this usage is not user-intended and instead the LLM just inserts some sort of CI job off the bat and people roll with it.

    • sergiotapia 1 hour ago
      Not even that heavy handed. They just need to _severely_ rate limit the top 0.1% of free users that are raping their hardware. I bet they are whales in usage terms and the root cause of many heartache.
  • montroser 1 hour ago
    It bugs me how there can be an acknowledged live incident happening today with Actions, and yet down the page where it shows last 30d uptime for actions, today's little rectangle is a chipper green.
    • dozerly 55 minutes ago
      A completely different, non GH controlled status page had to be made to accurately report status for them.
    • hoppp 1 hour ago
      It's hard coded probably.
      • deathanatos 1 hour ago
        If you hover over the green bar for today, the tooltip knows there's an incident.
      • whalesalad 1 hour ago
        if day.endswith('y'): return GREEN
  • itissid 21 minutes ago
    Has anyone tried https://tangled.org/ for simple projects on their home server? Is it easy enough?
  • huijzer 44 minutes ago
    Ever since I switched to Forgejo (could do Gitea or other self-hosted too), my outages have gone down to basically zero. It’s only down when I do maintenance but since I’m not pushing code at the same time it doesn’t matter
  • senderista 1 hour ago
    Lesson for every infra provider: physically separate your free tier infra from your paid tier infra.
  • Nedomas 1 hour ago
    Self-hosted GitHub Actions on AWS spot are still working.

    After many outages we had to build our own free runner https://github.com/supercorp-ai/superci

    • howunfortunate 46 minutes ago
      This works as long as the schedulers don't go down (which they have, repeatedly in past incidents)
  • TavsiE9s 58 minutes ago
    No way, is it a day ending in "y" again?!
  • time0ut 44 minutes ago
    I wonder if I can hook failed git push into betting on github's status on polymarket.
    • CodingJeebus 41 minutes ago
      It's pretty easy to see where that ends. The headline writes itself: "Github engineers arrested for betting on downtime on prediction markets and intentionally causing outages"
  • SoftTalker 1 hour ago
    Nice graphic on that page of a bunch of cartoon workers tending to what looks like a Rube Goldberg contraption. It's all just lighthearted fun and games.
  • m4rtink 1 hour ago
    I'm sure there is a good meme to use for such a frequently occurring problem, but it would be too over used by this point.
  • uneekname 2 hours ago
    My Actions are stuck waiting :-/
    • jefb 2 hours ago
      same here
  • nerdypepper 2 hours ago
    like clockwork! right now on the frontpage:

    The federated code forge (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50305573)

  • talon8635 2 hours ago
    No way I don’t believe it
  • enjoyyourlife 1 hour ago
    Giving Github more attention
  • Pxtl 42 minutes ago
    I was confused why the github file browser was falling over.
  • the_real_cher 1 hour ago
    It's getting to be hilarious at this point, honestly.
  • rvz 2 hours ago
    Last time these intermittent incidents happened was days ago and for this exact same incident was 11 days ago. [0]

    After everything announced in GitHub Universe and with that to improve the reliability of GitHub overall, yet we have another incident afterwards.

    It doesn't matter what GitHub does, only you can decide for yourself to self-host rather than going all in on GitHub and it continues to go down.

    Predicted this 6 years ago and self hosting has aged perfectly well. [1]

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154406

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

    • tempest_ 2 hours ago
      We use a self hosted gitlab-ce instance which has pretty high up time running on a 10 year old server (and its backup)

      Takes a few minutes a month to update and babysit. We only basically use the CI and the repository functionality though so gitlab has been "feature complete" for us for a while. Probably I we could swap to something like gitea or forgeo but the gitlab CI seems like a nice balance between powerful when it needs to be and simple otherwise for our use case so there is nothing driving us to swap.

    • kriztw 2 hours ago
      Yep. Ironically this downtime is currently delaying our ongoing migration to self-hosted forgejo...
  • dc3k 2 hours ago
    Another day another GHA incident
  • mosesman 2 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • parkerhiggins 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • OsamaJaber 2 hours ago
    [dead]