Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
Pretty self explanatory. Could you folks shed some light on why these issues keep happening?
I’ve noticed most posts and replies are just people coming to their own conclusions based on whatever published data.
I think it would be helpful to get some actual, non-corporate/marketing information on the goings-on by those that actually see what’s happening on the inside.
Thanks
Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
20% of all GitHub accounts were created in the past 6 months https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2082604368399159542
The fools thought we needed data centers for agents, but we actually needed data centers for Github!
GitHub’s reliability issues started earlier than the boom in agentic coding they talk about. I have comments on here from 2025 talking about massive outages with actions and issues.
When you're the uncontested market leader, you don't budget operations to be perfectly reliable, you budget to not be too unreliable. All those 9's are expensive after all.
The AI boom caught them napping though, and they're slipping well into the too unreliable category
> The AI boom caught them napping though
Microsoft, who invested horrendous sums into AI, even near to betting the whole company on an AI boom, is surprised about the AI boom?
Microsoft bet everything on possible AGI, no one thought the result would be a bonafide commit printing machine.
GitHub uptime is cyclical. It's bad because they won't focus on the core, and then the right users complain and GitHub focuses on core again before it repeats. This is just the latest round exacerbated by vibe coding
I want to believe that it's justification, but looking at the historical uptime [0] (early data is actually overly positive on this graph since it had to scrape historical data instead of realtime), I can't be convinced of this anymore. They do have more load - that's for sure. I just don't believe it's an excuse for their god awful uptime.
[0] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
I would take what C-level execs say with a grain of salt. Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience. They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
If load was an issue these things would have been solved already. Or they are purposely causing millions of dollars of productivity loss daily by not solving this.
Something more serious is at play. And I want to hear from the actual underlings.
More load does not just mean needing to increase capacity, which would be simple for Microsoft to do.
Additional load reveals limits and breaklines that were never known before - your temporary integer IDs are suddenly too small, you reach the maximum file descriptors in a Linux distro, your hash function suddenly has repeating conflicts, your DB index is suddenly oversaturated.
Having massive exponential growth of your traffic would probably require constant refactoring to meet the ever changing system limits.
> They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
Amazing you can say this with a straight face in these DC building times.
Have you tried getting Azure east instances anytime lately?
> I would take what C-level execs say with a grain of salt.
100% agree.
> Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience.
Not my overall experience 30 years in the industry.
> They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
You'll always be asked to do more with less, at least, that's my own experience.
Also my experience
Also my experience
Infra is a cost center for a business unless your a PaaS and even then maybe still. Cost centers are usually ferreted out for savings, not investment.
Infra is a cost center right up until its absence begins to undercut your value proposition to customers, and then it becomes an investment. GitHub seems well on the wrong side of that equation right now.
In general true. But most of paying customers, including enterprise have made a bet that they cut down expense and resources on operational experience, system management knowledge to minimum because cloud .
So even if these cloud/SAAS solutions perform poorly it is not like customers have wherewithal to create alternate solutions.
> it is not like customers have wherewithal to create alternate solutions.
it's not impossible. they don't, right up until they do
I think owning GitHub is a prestige play, not necessarily thought of as a profit center.
Now however, it's competing for resources directly with the corporations core strategic plans.
GitHub having issues is embarrassing, but the shareholders don't really care.
>They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
Hey man, in case you hadn't heard, the hardware industry is having a lot of trouble keeping up. "Expand our capacity" isn't as easy as it was 2 years ago.
My pet theory is they backed themselves into a corner with Actions. That was a step change in computational scaling effort. It also fell immediately on the heels of the Microsoft acquisition.
Something about these two factors seems to have conspired to wreak absolute havoc on their uptime in the ~7yr hence. The AI slopocalypse hasn't helped matters, but the foundations were laid far earlier.
Would love to hear from an insider, either for or against this conspiracy theory.
That is a good point. And this issue looks analogous to what is happening in the research publication world (arxiv, peer-review, etc). In particular, I wonder whether code pushed is of lesser quality, CI pipelines break more often too, and this saturates github servers.
I'm curios what is the bottleneck then? Because github(ms) has enough resources to hire competent people and provision needed hw to solve scaling the issues.
need competent people to hire competent people first - it seems like their only directive is to raise $MSFT not make good tech
(talking about leadership, not my lovely msft engineers reading this)
Looking at the design of Github Actions, I don't see any competency.
Probably contention on databases.
Yeah, aren't they super geniuses with infra that scales with a button, etc.?
> infra that scales with a button
That is how Microsoft markets Azure. :-)
My sense is that a lot of this activity isn't even legitimate use. As one example: my company has a GitHub app, and last night some bot added my app to 1700 repos. Then the bot immediately started rapid-firing commits which each affected hundreds of files, triggering a deluge of GitHub webhooks to my servers.
The repo names all matched other GitHub apps, so my sense is this bot had added 1700 GitHub apps to 1700 repos, with that number rapidly increasing at the upper bound of whatever GitHub's rate limit is.
My systems caught it quickly and auto-booted the bot, but the whole situation is ridiculous.
Yeah I think that's really important. The average value of each commit, action, or hook has become significantly lower, and that necessarily means that they can't spend on quality. If you set the quality bar to cater to the top 10% of value-creating users (us) the amount you'd pay for quality at times when quality matters none would truly and completely sink you
The GitHub bot situation is so frustrating! A good ~50% of community traffic on our repos is spam and bots and to report them I have to fill out a lengthy form and MAYBE GitHub will ban them six weeks later. And I also can't tell whether our repos are being used (and thus worth investing in): GitHib only shows two weeks of traffic data and what they do have is completely useless because they can't filter out bot traffic.
there's this attack on youtube where people who dont want their real names known will autoblock comments with their real names; bots will spam comments with every word and note the ones that were not visible.
kinda reminds me of it. not my most valuable contribution to forensics, admittedly.
> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating.
Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? They are handling it a lot better than Github. Just because you have fast growth does not mean you can not handle it.
Instead you have to realize that you are entering into a high growth phase and design around that.
It has been clear that we are in a high growth phase for around a year now and Github still hasn't adapted to that properly.
At some point you have to admit that Github ready for the moment.
GitHub is on Azure. Azure is notorious for being terrible. There was a post here recently from an ex-Azure engineer explaining all of this in a multi-part series.
Edit: Found the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
I didn't think they'd completed the move yet, it's only partially on Azure - which to be fair could be another problem in itself.
Isn't a lot of OpenAI infra also on Azure? They seem to be faring better than GitHub.
I bet OpenAI has failovers to other data centers. I think they have a variety of data center provides all over the place.
There's already a noun for this: "resources"
Q. how can someone publish an article like that, with their name, etc...
Don't they sign NDAs? Do they not care? Are they not enforceable?
Very curious to know.
Maybe they didn’t take the severance part that makes the NDA valid? IIRC for an NDA to be enforceable there has to be a monetary consideration to it. Or maybe it’s for no competes?
For a very long time this year Claude was down multiple times a week. Can’t speak for OpenAI
OpenAI and Anthropic are spending hundreds of billions of dollars that they may never recoup forcing the building massive new data centers in the face of widespread protest.
You think GitHub ought to match that?
> OpenAI and Anthropic are spending hundreds of billions of dollars that they may never recoup forcing the building massive new data centers in the face of widespread protest.
So has Github's owner Microsoft. It's build out is on par with OpenAI and Anthropic.
> You think GitHub ought to match that?
Microsoft is.
The issue is that the software stack is not stable. That is clearly the issue here.
It isn't a hardware build out issue. It is related to the architecture of Github.
Open AI and Claude were not nearly as mature as Github when the boom started. That's a lot of legacy infra to scale up.
OpenAI and Claude don't accept commits and host PRs? How are they the same?
They're getting increasing demand for tokens at an accelerating pace.
Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though?
Like, I get there are other features they have, and things like history, but I don't think it's quite the same.
Isn't most (not all) of the LLM's resources stateless compute to a large degree?
(Not defending MS at all though, I currently can't create a PR on the required branch for my work (won't load the branch list) and their availability is really bad recently).
I am pretty sure OpenAI and Claude actually have a higher hardware cost per request that Microsoft. Github is actually most just a standard REST API app, although with some caching and git specific operations in the background. It is not as hardware intensive as GPU-based inference per quest with huge contexts and low latency.
Also Github's feature offering has been incredibly stable for the last 6 years. There isn't an excuse for it to be unstable like this.
Yes, but come on...
That's due to the need for ultra-fast memory and inference compute, it's not the same thing.
Fundamentally, there's incoming requests, an application server, and a database. The devil is in the nature of those requests, and how do you process those requests and stick them in the database. And then serve them back out again. Different application, different database, but fundamentally, it's the same problem. Google managed to do this very well. Microsoft has not.
They're undergoing the same kind of load. Almost every AI commit that's putting pressure on GitHub's servers was written on OpenAI and Anthropic's servers.
Scaling ChatGPT and scaling GitHub are very different problems.
For LLMs, prompt handling is effectively stateless. They do try to route follow-up prompts to the same cluster to benefit from prompt caching, but those can be effectively sharded. They also need to write results to storage but that's on a per-customer basis, so also easy to shard.
GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become instantly available to all readers across all geographies. They have a very different shape of scaling challenge to the LLM vendors.
> GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become instantly available to all readers across all geographies. They have a very different shape of scaling challenge to the LLM vendors.
Github data is accessible by all (if open source), but they should be partition-able by individual repository (and their related forks.). Thus while there is more shared state across users, it isn't fully shared state.
And they have been working on this semi-shared state design for over 10 years now.
Every response from GitHub must be deterministic. OpenAI and Anthropic do not have this problem.
> Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage?
By spending tens of billions in investor cash. It is not clear what a sustainable business model looks like for these companies at the moment.
> They are handling it a lot better than Github.
Are they? Anthropic has fairly frequent issues.
There's high growth and then there's demand increasing 10x in a year. For a mature business like github that's a massive, and I can't think of many big businesses who would be able to scale smoothly to accommodate that kind of demand.
Well they heavily limit free tier usage and for paid users they are charging a tiered pricing model that ramps up very aggressively. Github is a lot more generous in this sense and it has a lot more surface area in terms of the functionality it serves
> They are handling it a lot better than Github.
No, they are not.
https://status.claude.com/
https://www.githubstatus.com/
This would require foresight, budget, and attention. MS currently has none of these.
Turns out that the cloud doesn’t scale that easily by itself after all?
> Turns out that the cloud doesn’t scale that easily by itself after all?
The cloud does scale that easily, the software doesn't. :-)
The obvious answer is to end free unlimited private repos. Source is no longer a specific thing. GitHub is just a free S3 or Azure provider.
A lot of private repos are probably just taking up cheap storage space, not seeing activity that would cause additional load.
I think this would cut out a lot of the mindless commit activity.
Charge $1/month per repo. If your project isn't worth that, run your own git or use another free forge.
What about $1/year per private repo?
I think GitHub leans on this free repos thing a lot for getting new users though. Like I could see people just moving to GitLab
Free private repos on github is relatively new, only introduced after a rise in popularity of gitlab (which has free private repos).
Seems like github is too popular for itself.
I know you said "relatively", but it's been seven and a half years: https://github.blog/changelog/2019-01-08-pricing-changes/
…and encountering the same issues most likely.
Fair, but the point is GitHub’s model is:
Free Users use GitHub => when a company needs source control => all their coders use GitHub => company buys expensive enterprise contract.
If there’s less of an advantage to using free GitHub then that funnel works less effectively.
GH isn't good enough to charge that much for its core services. 90% of its user base would just find better or cheaper alternatives, and the only ones remaining would be legacy enterprise codebases that are just impossible or too expensive to migrate.
80/20 rule would suggest that you don't need to apply $1 to all users, just those who create an excessive number of AI slop repos or make an excessive number of commits.
Could do similar for GH actions usage.
I would have thought it's public repos that got the most AI slop recently as a form of gathering karma and boost CVs. It would be nice to know if private repo commits increased instead.
I can't believe they've been asleep all these months, not foreseeing that AI would generate more commits and Git usage and, consequently, not preparing themselves to scale.
Github is owned by Microsoft, its not like its some boostrapped startup who has a closet of servers that are melting.
And on top of that, Microsoft is one of the companies that created this problem in the first place.
Nobody at Microsoft could've predicted AI was going to be so popular!
Like the way that they shipped ‘95 without a browser?
If that's the superficial cause, then the root cause is a lack of limits. Any production system in the world will go down from too much load if you don't limit the load. You have to do performance testing to determine what the system's peak utilization is, and put limits in place to prevent exceeding that limit.
There are multiple kinds of limits you need. First you need the raw i/o limits on things like networking, load balancer requests per second, etc so you don't slow to a crawl on high load; you can throttle max i/o so demanding users don't steal performance for others, or even throttle network traffic to the client IP and internal services. Then you need additional limits at app layer, like number of requests you can process that make DB calls (as most DBs have a connection and request limit), or limit API requests to X/minute. Then you need more business logic limits, like max number of concurrent logged-in users, max number of repos a user can have, max number of requests for free users, priority for paid requests, etc.
When you hit a limit, you have a couple choices. You can shed load (dropping calls immediately, which results in 503 errors for users, or even network disconnects), but it makes a very poor user experience, and can cause larger issues/conflicts in a distributed system. You can instead keep a max number of active sessions, and adjust that number over time, to ensure that (on average) your users have a stable experience; this requires implementing a "waiting room" for new sessions when old ones expire or log out; still not great for users, but it prevents everyone from getting random errors, which means the majority of users have a good experience.
There are way more kinds of limits to implement. Each business has to analyze its entire system to identify performance bottlenecks and implement limits to ensure the majority of users continue to have good service. Without those limits, you get a shit experience for everyone, your brand is tarnished, and customers run for the hills.
Finally, the performance testing helps you plan how much infrastructure you need to serve a given number of users. If you plan properly, you know X infra allows for Y number of users. Once you exceed Y users, you need to start throttling or stopping new user signup (and requests per minute) until you can increase capacity. Continuing to allow signups and additional usage, without the capacity to support it, results in what we see today.
But competent engineers know all this. If they had competent engineers, and it gets this bad anyway, the problem is management. Microsoft likely already made back what they acquired GitHub for. They probably figured they could keep riding the gravy train until the train went off the rails, and either eventually sell GitHub or write it off. Such is business.
I really enjoyed this read, as I am starting to grapple with some of this now. Do you have any resources for learning more about this stuff and these tradeoffs?
> until the train went off the rails
Ironically the core application is written in rails, which may be part of the issue
I think that data is a bit dated and misleading, but I would love to see if AI slop is a contributing factor here once the dust settles and how Github will address it. Looking at the return to mean in https://areyougoingexponential.rhys.dev/kdaigle makes me think the COO spike could be a Karpathy wiki or an agent too.
> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year,
OK so then use the additional revenue to add more resources and employees? What the f*k are they doing over there?
> OK so then use the additional revenue to add more resources and employees?
What revenue? I'd assume the people pushing thousands of AI-generated commits are not the people paying for GitHub Enterprise.
> What revenue
I'd assume at least a portion of them are paying for GitHub Pro, and by now at least a small % would have converted to Enterprise.
If not, then they need to fix their operational model - I don't understand people acting like this is some insurmountable challenge given Microsoft reported over $331 billion in total revenue and an operating income exceeding $155 billion in 2026.
Changing the operating model can be surprisingly tough for an established business. Imagine the outcry if they started charging per git push, for example.
Clearly, something needs to change. But if they're not careful they might provoke a reaction from their existing userbase that's even more negative that the response to these outages.
Sure, but max 100 pushes per day per account? Or should it be higher?
> can be tough
Of course it can - everything is tough at that scale, but their parent company has billions in profit. They've had a year to come up with a plan/fix and have failed miserably.
What revenue do AI-boosted commits provide? Am I missing something?
You're missing the fact that Microsoft reported over $331 billion in total revenue and an operating income exceeding $155 billion - this is a fixable problem.
If they're really that cash-strapped at GitHub, then are they planning to just continue allowing this to happen and drown, or fix the issues? This has been ongoing for over a year.
So why did all the Azure and Github engineers leave then? There's only management and outsourced cheap labor there, and management has no idea. Cheap labor even less
Is there additional revenue from a bunch of people pushing their vibe-coded stuff up to Github?
Are these disproportionately in the free tier? Or is the increased storage load similar across the paid tiers?
Might be worth considering a /GB/MO fee. Let's face it, VCS is a (glorified) storage service.
I think Github should start charging who goes beyond fair usages.
I just checked no 1 vibe coder https://github.com/steipete and he has like 279,440. Compared this to Taylor who works on huge project like Laravel and is only around 8k commits.
The scam that anthropic pulled, is they remove free tier (bad idea for Github honestly), but blame it on AI vibe code abusers. Instead of for example finding the 1-5% of absolutely aggregous users like Steipete and restricting them.
it's a bit of a stretch to call removing a free tier a scam. as you can see a lot of people in this thread are saying Github should start charging.
It is just an excuse. If they can't support paid member or don't have infra they should start charging these slop projects who are committing relentlessly.
Github used to be built on mysql / redis / ruby on rails / C / shell, running on dedicated hardware. Microsoft left it like that after they acquired the company.
Eventually, though, they decided to migrate the whole thing to Azure. And they were far enough through that to be basically committed... when AI coding started hitting them with much higher workloads.
I personally think the reliability problems are more to do with the reliability of the Azure migration. But both factors are likely relevant.
14x commit growth in one year is brutal for any infrastructure. Scaling isn't just adding hardware.
non-helpful answer: the "Microsoft Acquires GitHub" line in this graph answers all questions https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
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.
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.
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.
I’ve noticed the same thing with computers, whenever I install MS windows on them uptime tanks ;)
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.
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."
[dead]
On the other hand I think usage increased and GitHub operates now at a different scale.
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
Lovable only uses GitHub for storing projects. And requires people to provide their own GitHub account. Lots of vibe coders with no technical background are now having lovable push commits to GitHub
Many microsoft services are down/failing today, including sites hosted on Azure. I'm guessing it's a larger MS outage.
So perhaps we should be asking Azure engineers, not Guthub engineers?
GutHub, a SaaS for tracking your gut microbiome
Are they? https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status doesn't support this afaict.
The page shows all green, which coincidentally is also how it looks when Azure is down. That page is for SLA/billing purposes, it won't show live incidents as they occur.
> That page is for SLA/billing purposes, it won't show live incidents as they occur.
lol ... That is absolutely hilarious ... I'm not sure if it is /s, but if this is true, enterprise stupidity has reached a new level.
How sure are we that their status page is accurate? AWS's status page often lags actual issues.
AWS's status page would be green after a microsingularity swallowed the solar system. Azure's status page is very similar.
I got an "it is unacceptable" from their CPO on 8/7, and that they are "working around the clock on it".
https://x.com/mariorod1/status/2085800861469495465
I really think something deeper is going wrong there, and they're not being honest with their paying customers (and enterprises) about it.
The reality is that it's probably a skill issue. Scaling a mature platform 10x can be a really, really hard problem, they obviously don't have their arms around a solution, and are probably spending a majority of their time on ops to keep the bleeding down. In the old days you would have Jeff Dean come down from heaven and invent a new database for you or something like that. It doesn't really seem like Github has that kind of technical ability, so they're probably trying to cobble together Azure ops with internal bandaids while everyone internally is cranking out AI code and it's just not going to be enough.
I mean they may be working around the clock, but after 5 or 6 layoffs in 3 years… half their engineers are probably still learning the code base.
Yeah, and the rest are probably not quite so invested.
I think it's two things:
- GitHub attempting (and seemingly failing) to move to Azure infrastucture for its website backend
- AI generated code wrecking the site due to the volume of activities.
So you're asking github employees to violate their NDA?
Frankly yes. Do it in a way that doesn’t violate outright or cover your tracks. Customers deserve to know the truth of the type of company they are dealing with.
So someone should potentially get fired and face legal action to satisfy your curiosity which you'll get sated anyway when you read the postmortem in a few days?
It’s not like OP is putting a gun to anyone’s head!! If they want to share we’d appreciate but there is no obligation.
Are you also shocked that you can stand in the middle of the highway and get hit by a car and die? You can do it if someone asks you but you’re not forced to.
We can only ask.
Don't act shocked.
Also, gritty insider information is never the same as the official word.
It's not the postmortem du jour that we want, the whole pattern is a mystery. Do they push releases every day and bring down the site every day by botched rollouts? What really is it why they can't GH keep the core service running (e.g. pushing commits and pulling changes)?
Github Status: Incident with GitHub.com
Aug 17, 21:15 UTC Resolved - On August 17, 2026, from 13:28–21:15 UTC (7h 47m),
GitHub.com experienced elevated errors and latency across Issues, Pull Requests, APIs, Actions, and Copilot. At peak, web/API error rates were approximately 20%, while archive and raw-content downloads reached approximately 50%. SAML/OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync were also affected, as well as Actions workflows in GHEC with Data Residency that depend on public workflow step definitions hosted on GitHub.com. Most services recovered by 16:36 UTC as our Central US datacenter recovered; Actions was degraded until approximately 18:03 UTC; and Copilot Token Service fully recovered by 21:02.
Some of the failing traffic was moved from Central US to Northern Virginia where it was served successfully until the network failure in Central US was debugged and resolved. Delayed replies to a single internal endpoint triggered a latent retry bug in VS Code that amplified traffic by approximately 10x and caused delayed recovery for the Copilot Token Service.
The immediate cause of the failure was network saturation on load balancers in Central US due to a new peak in traffic. Originally this was caused by an Istio sidecar pod reaching its concurrency limits and failing to auto scale correctly because of a misconfigured policy that watched host service but not sidecar limits. One failure cascaded to more and eventually four HAProxy nodes exhausted their flow limits, degrading the gateway auth path and causing widespread authentication latency and failures. The problem was worsened by optimistic retry logic which overloaded internal load balancers. Pausing HAProxy on those nodes simultaneously produced immediate broad recovery. The retry storm in Northern VA was fixed by 1) temporarily reducing gateway retry logic with a PR and 2) blocking inbound Copilot Token Service token requests at the load balancers with a 403, and then gradually ramping back up traffic per-site to allow callers to succeed. Residual Copilot authentication failures continued because client retry behavior amplified load: a failed token operation could generate many extra requests and enter a retry loop. Copilot Token Service traffic increased from a normal 7–9K RPS to 70–100K RPS. Reducing gateway authentication retries and blocking retry-triggering responses stabilized Copilot Token Service and completed recovery.
Complicating factors that impeded recovery included a number of scraping attacks on codeload endpoints.
To prevent recurrence, our follow-up actions include:
- Correcting autoscaling policies to account for service-mesh sidecar concurrency and capacity.
- Auditing Istio request, concurrency, and scaling limits across affected services.
- Reviewing retry limits and backoff behavior across gateways and clients.
- Addressing the VS Code retry behavior that amplified Copilot token traffic.
So basically bad code pushes that caused request amplification and then huge gaps in operational scaling and reliability standards. Oof.
Github moved to azure -> infrastructure problems
It's bad karma to sling mud about outages or problems. Cloudflare used to sling mud back in the day and then they went through some really bad outages afterwards.
AI + Microsoft = kabum
GitHub is struggling because it is owned by Microsoft.
GitHub Will Prioritize Migrating to Azure Over Feature Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173 - October 2025 (63 comments)
HN Search: azure capacity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Azure Capacity Crunch Extends into 2026 Amid Data Center Constraints - https://windowsforum.com/threads/azure-capacity-crunch-exten... - October 9th, 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427779
and yet people do not leave, hence the power of switching costs. (Paying Customers).
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-dropbox-is-a-obvious-pe-tar...
The alternatives exist but aren't exactly stellar. Otherwise I think this thread would be filled with recommendations.
i guess its because of the new cursor platform
If you are doing 1000 commits a day, whats the point of git?
Does the AI ever look back at the shit trail it left behind?
Diffs are no longer diffs, they look like largescale delete and rewrite
AI definitely does look at git commit history in my experience
It's gotten me out of a few sticky merges by examining history and providing information about why changes were done.
It certainly looks at the commit history more than I ever have. I find it quite cool when it points out interesting hints from the history.
Microsoft. Azure. AI.
Pick one!
I pick Azure but not Microsoft (?)
Also the fact that its written in Ruby on Rails probably doesn’t make it easier, performance wise.
Honestly. They’re already performing miracles with RoR.
How many non Ruby apps and all the databases and systems behind could climb their traffic 14x when they probably only perf-tested for a sustained 2-3x and, and paid for a profitable amount of rack space rather than a “lol, VC money, we’ll 10x later” amount of infra.
Systems engineers generally don't run performance tests at 2x or any specific scale.
You load test and see how much it takes until the system falls over - basically you DDoS yourself and see what the numbers were when things broke, and what broke first second so on. Maybe in a sandbox maybe against prod.
It's very telling that issues began almost to the day of the Microsoft acquisition.
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