[HN Gopher] GitHub experiencing issues with actions, pull reques...
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       GitHub experiencing issues with actions, pull requests, packages
        
       Author : Amorymeltzer
       Score  : 177 points
       Date   : 2021-02-08 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.githubstatus.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.githubstatus.com)
        
       | alfiedotwtf wrote:
       | Curious: are Microsoft slowly replacing the innards of GitHub
       | with a Microsoft stack?
        
         | qbasic_forever wrote:
         | The main web backend is still ruby it seems:
         | https://github.blog/2020-08-25-upgrading-github-to-ruby-2-7/ I
         | can't remember where it was exactly but I remember recently
         | stumbling on a random github-related OSS project that had
         | chatter in the issues from githubbers talking about .NET and
         | C#. It would not surprise me to see significant pressure from
         | the now 2-year post-acquisition engineering org to get in line
         | with the rest of MS's online services that are all .NET stack.
        
       | FunnyLookinHat wrote:
       | This same pattern happened last week - Webhooks reporting issues,
       | then Pull Requests, etc. This one seems to be affecting the rest
       | of their systems a bit more (or maybe they're just being a bit
       | more detailed in exactly what is down this time).
       | 
       | https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/5zb8gfbl7qkt
        
       | pestkranker wrote:
       | ~10 downtime per month. What is happening at GitHub?
        
         | hulitu wrote:
         | > ~10 downtime per month. What is happening at GitHub?
         | 
         | They belong to Microsoft. Reliability was never a feature of
         | Microsoft products.
        
         | Droobfest wrote:
         | Maybe they're porting over the Azure DevOps code which also has
         | 'degraded performance' issues about every other day.
        
         | tylfin wrote:
         | The last time this happened, it was after they shipped the
         | phone app.
         | 
         | I wonder if they have a big feature underway or are just
         | migrating more infrastructure to Azure?
         | 
         | EDIT: Either way, some postmortems would be appreciated before
         | more customers have to look for a backup solution...
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | If you're working on a serious project, hosting it mainly on
           | GitHub via Git and don't already have a backup solution in
           | place, I'm afraid you're late. But better late than never!
           | Make sure you can always deploy when less reliable services
           | are down, and GitHub has always been one of those. Git makes
           | it incredibly easy as well, as long as you have your CI/CD
           | externalized already.
        
             | tylfin wrote:
             | Yeah, this is very good advice.
             | 
             | I think if revenue or product quality is tied to a VCS,
             | having an active-active or active-passive setup is the way
             | to go.
             | 
             | Fortunately, I'm on an on-prem product so that investment
             | hasn't seemed worth it yet.
             | 
             | This doesn't mean we don't escrow our code, but rather than
             | try to rebuild from source, I just take a short coffee
             | break and wait for the impacted service to come back up :)
        
           | dessant wrote:
           | I'm still awaiting the promised post-mortem [1] of a
           | retracted blog post [2][3] which has annnounced the
           | deprecation of the GitHub Developer Program.
           | 
           | > There must be quite a story behind this - will you be
           | putting up a post-mortem ? (Post mortems of business
           | "outages" are usually more instructional)
           | 
           | > Yes. We will. Please stay tuned.
           | 
           | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21718171
           | 
           | [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21718083
           | 
           | [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20191205225751/https://develo
           | per...
        
         | Florin_Andrei wrote:
         | > _What is happening at GitHub?_
         | 
         | They were acquired by Microsoft a while ago, and now the
         | chicken are coming home to roost.
         | 
         | It's pretty much on par with my Azure experience.
        
           | robbyt wrote:
           | Me too. The only people who think Azure is viable, haven't
           | actually used it.
        
             | seniorThrowaway wrote:
             | I recently left a project using AWS for one using Azure. I
             | thought the AWS API's were inconsistent and janky but they
             | look great compared to Azure. Azure is also extremely slow
             | to perform actions in my experience and the documentation
             | is very heavily tilted towards being sales funnels. I do
             | like the keyvault service and the idea of resource groups.
             | The whole tenant / subscription / roles / user mess of
             | permissions not so much, but I expected that from
             | Microsoft.
        
         | bredren wrote:
         | This is a big problem with GitHub Actions.
         | 
         | It took a community drumbeat and persistence from an enterprise
         | customer to get the status message to even show a problem last
         | month. [1]
         | 
         | It does suck and I do think there must be some political
         | infighting going on that the service is having so many
         | disruptions.
         | 
         | There's no excuse for something this important to not only have
         | so much unplanned downtime, but no resources to connect with
         | the community by offering post mortems or other reasonable
         | interactions.
         | 
         | That said, I'm still all in on GA. It's amazing and the
         | coupling with repos is great. It continues to be subtly
         | refined. So I just hope whoever is holding this product back
         | gets out of the way.
         | 
         | [1] https://github.community/t/random-unknown-blob-error-when-
         | pu...
        
         | TruthWillHurt wrote:
         | Microsoft.
        
         | rvz wrote:
         | All I know is that it doesn't seem like a wise choice to be
         | locked into GitHub features or even use their tools with these
         | frequent downtime episodes.
         | 
         | If a large open-source organisation was to rely on say, GitHub
         | Actions for example, well you'll probably see more and more of
         | "GitHub down" posts and they'll be unable to push that critical
         | patch or run that cloud CI on GitHub, and some maybe
         | considering solutions like this [0].
         | 
         | Every time this happens, you'll be completely locked in and
         | ending up contacting / complaining to the CEO of GitHub for
         | support via Twitter.
         | 
         | No thanks and no deal I'm afraid.
         | 
         | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23849565
        
           | bob1029 wrote:
           | Good deal for us, actually. I used to get upset about this,
           | but the alternative really does suck more.
           | 
           | You can either deal with the occasional non-productivity from
           | a SAAS offering (which for GH has never lasted more than
           | ~half a work day), or you can spin up all your own stack on-
           | prem and generate 10 additional full-time problems in the
           | quest to solve this one periodic issue.
           | 
           | The trick is to never put yourself in a position where your
           | tools absolutely must work immediately or you lose a
           | customer. Why make a promise on delivering a piece of
           | software until its already in hand? Also, if github goes down
           | and I really wanted to get an issue comment in, I can just
           | open a text editor and keep a note around in my local repo
           | until everything is back up. I can even do some crazy things,
           | like share my local branches with other developers over side
           | channels until things get back to normal in the centralized
           | system.
           | 
           | Wasn't this kinda the entire point of talking developers into
           | moving to the git model? Would be fun to rewind the clock and
           | use these takes as an argument for sticking with TFS, et. al.
        
             | yarcob wrote:
             | > I can even do some crazy things, like share my local
             | branches with other developers over side channels
             | 
             | Haha, right, totally crazy, you could use git just like it
             | was designed to be used! Who would do that!!
             | 
             | (Joking aside, despite Githubs frequent outages, I don't
             | recall the git service itself ever being affected)
        
               | bob1029 wrote:
               | > I don't recall the git service itself ever being
               | affected
               | 
               | The most important part of their service has never failed
               | to work for me over the last 6 years.
        
             | swagonomixxx wrote:
             | I agree with you. To me it just sounds like people being
             | entitled, expecting a service to never go down, ever. Shit
             | happens and things go down. Design your processes around
             | that fact and have procedures lined up for when it does
             | happen.
             | 
             | However, saying "just get GitLab and deploy it to your own
             | server" glosses over the huge time sink it is, especially
             | for small companies that are already short-staffed, to
             | maintain something like that. I sure as heck do not want to
             | be responsible for keeping my GitLab server up.
             | 
             | As you say, if you're writing an issue, put it in an editor
             | issues.md file or something. If you're working on code,
             | even better, just commit locally.
        
               | leesalminen wrote:
               | Hosting Gitlab hasn't been a huge time sink for me and
               | I'm a one-person show who is conscious about my time. I
               | set up automatic updates and haven't SSH'd into that
               | machine in about a year.
        
               | bob1029 wrote:
               | I agree that in many scenarios you will find that your
               | approach is perfectly valid.
               | 
               | For us, we have ~8 people that need to use the system all
               | at the same time. We utilize issues very heavily (we are
               | entering 5 figures), with lots of data-heavy QA content
               | throughout (screenshots/videos/binaries/etc).
               | Additionally, our customer environments are actually
               | configured to talk directly to our GitHub repository for
               | purposes of rebuilding themselves from source at update
               | time.
               | 
               | Because of the number of participants who are involved
               | with our particular usage of GitHub, we find that a
               | hosted solution with horizontal scalability and
               | resilience to be an excellent fit. We have made the
               | decision to make it Microsoft's problem to figure out how
               | to eventually deal with 10k+ issues and 200+
               | employees/clients trying to hit the same host all at the
               | same time.
               | 
               | If we had decided to host our own GitHub/Lab server in
               | our cloud environment, we would be having to constantly
               | review the capacity of the IT systems. As we add
               | employees and customers, the load we put on our source
               | control solution will increase linearly. Additionally,
               | because of the deploy-time approach, having a solution
               | that is backed by someone else's network means that we
               | don't have to worry about our private network being
               | slammed by outside requests. Our total checkout is
               | nearing a gigabyte, so you can see how this might scale
               | poorly if we operated out of our own infrastructure.
               | 
               | I almost feel like we are abusive of Microsoft's
               | generosity considering the sheer amount of content we
               | have throughout our organization's account. Every day I
               | wonder when I am going to get some email demanding that
               | we switch to a more expensive enterprise plan because of
               | how we use the service. Maybe that day will never come.
               | Even if it does, I will gladly shell out for the bigger
               | contract.
        
       | GordonS wrote:
       | I noticed that code search seems to be broken too - hasn't been
       | working for 1-2 hours.
       | 
       | Search still works for issues, repos etc, but not code.
        
         | inetknght wrote:
         | Github's code search has never been useful though
        
           | mistersys wrote:
           | GitHub search is not very smart, but I prefer that when
           | searching code. When searching code, I'm usually trying to
           | find exact tokens i.e. a variable name or an error message
           | string vs. searching documents.
           | 
           | I find it useful all the time.
        
             | zoomablemind wrote:
             | 'git grep' allows the search within the repo, assuming that
             | you have it cloned locally.
        
             | upbeat_general wrote:
             | I also find it useful yet it still often misses exact
             | matches.
             | 
             | If I search for "int x = 5" and it doesn't return "int x =
             | 5;", there's an issue here.
        
             | inetknght wrote:
             | I've found that `grep` with PCRE enabled is far more useful
             | to find exact tokens like variable names or error message
             | strings.
             | 
             | I've never had Github's search find what I'm looking for.
        
               | remram wrote:
               | That requires you to clone. It's a minor hassle if you
               | search over a single repo, but when searching across an
               | organization or the whole site, using grep is not an
               | option.
        
               | inetknght wrote:
               | > _That requires you to clone. It 's a minor hassle if
               | you search over a single repo, but when searching across
               | an organization or the whole site, using grep is not an
               | option._
               | 
               | Are you kidding? The finer granularity that searching
               | over an organization or whole site makes grep the far
               | better choice especially since its output can be fed as
               | input to more filtering steps.
        
               | remram wrote:
               | I can't understand your point. GitHub _can_ search over
               | finer granularities e.g. single repo. And did you
               | understand my use case at all, about grep not being an
               | option when searching at wider scales?
               | 
               | No, I am not "kidding"... are you?
        
               | inetknght wrote:
               | I don't understand grep not being an option when
               | searching at wider scales. I have yet to find a wide-
               | enough scale that grep can't handle.
               | 
               | And GitHub's search results are _literally_ useless.
               | 
               | > _No, I am not "kidding"... are you?_
               | 
               | Nope
        
         | kawsper wrote:
         | Code search have been broken for us for a couple of months,
         | it's no longer reliable, I suspect something is wrong with
         | their indexer.
        
           | neovintage wrote:
           | I'm sorry code search isn't working. I'm more than happy to
           | help. If you reach out to me via my email I can see whats up.
           | neovintage [at] github [dot] com.
        
             | kawsper wrote:
             | I will reach out to my team and send you an e-mail.
        
         | j1elo wrote:
         | As others have noted, GitHub Search is not particularly
         | reliable. It might make you think you're finding all uses of
         | some token, but that can be misleading as not all instances are
         | necessarily shown:
         | 
         | https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43891605/search-partial-...
        
       | forlorn wrote:
       | Oh, weekly _Github is down_.
        
         | encom wrote:
         | Related: Seems like every other day "$PRODUCT is down" is #1 on
         | HN. Why? This can't possibly satisfy anyones intellectual
         | curiosity.
        
           | Florin_Andrei wrote:
           | I thought this was obvious, but apparently it isn't - not
           | 100% of things posted on this forum (or any forum, or the
           | vast majority of human interactions) are driven purely by
           | some abstract "intellectual curiosity" concept.
        
             | encom wrote:
             | No shit, you arrogant cretin. I referring to the HN
             | submission guidelines, which specifically uses the
             | "intellectual curiosity" wording.
        
           | cronix wrote:
           | Because many people here actually _use_ the affected
           | services?
        
             | hulitu wrote:
             | So the solution is easy: don't use it anymore.
        
             | encom wrote:
             | I understand that. That doesn't make it interesting.
        
               | brutal_chaos_ wrote:
               | Receiving crumbs of info as to WHY a service is down is
               | interesting to some. These are also great for tracking
               | postmortems (unless they take awhile, then it's a
               | separate post).
               | 
               | Speculation is entertaining to many as well. Or perhaps
               | this sparks an idea for someone (omg, GH is down ALL THE
               | TIME, time to build a novel competitor!).
               | 
               | And given the crap state status pages are in these days
               | (stop showing green when your site is down!), these are
               | great for knowing when a service is operating again.
               | 
               | EDIT: words r hard
        
           | judge2020 wrote:
           | Probably something about centralization and relying on a
           | company for keeping your business running. But, of course
           | GitHub Enterprise Server deployments aren't down, so anyone
           | that really needs uptime can pay for the privilege (or can
           | pay for GH One which has a "30-minute SLA").
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | fartcannon wrote:
       | What options exist for decentralized source discovery
       | indexes/pages? Like the Pirate Bay used to be (might still be, I
       | haven't looked in a while).
       | 
       | Just searchable links to torrent based git repos.
       | 
       | Googling suggests there was once (and still might be) a
       | 'GitTorrent' which is a fantastic name for the service.
        
         | qbasic_forever wrote:
         | Git was designed for decentralized use. It's not as slick and
         | polished as github, but it can get the job done and scales to
         | infinity (the linux kernel has thousands of contributors and
         | runs entirely dencentralized with git).
         | 
         | For read-only access you can host a git repo on any static file
         | store, like S3, netlify, digital ocean, etc. Just
         | rsync/rclone/upload a bare repo from your machine and you're
         | done: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-
         | Git...
         | 
         | For write access it's more difficult without running your own
         | server (which is super easy with gitea, gogs, etc. and just a
         | couple clicks to setup on popular hosts like digital ocean).
         | You could take an entirely decentralized approach and run
         | things like the linux kernel--all patches (aka pull requests)
         | get sent to an email list where they're reviewed, discussed,
         | and integrated by the maintainer of the read-only repo.
        
       | LinusS1 wrote:
       | Azure just needed a quick reboot
        
       | expliced wrote:
       | Commits I pushed were not showing up on my pull-request in the
       | UI, was wondering what was going on. This explains it.
        
       | superkuh wrote:
       | Play stupid games with centralized entities, win stupid
       | centralized prizes. I can understand using github/lab/etc if
       | you're forced to by work in order to earn money in order to live.
       | But willingly choosing them for personal projects is just stupid.
        
         | TobiasA wrote:
         | "Using GitHub for personal projects is stupid" is a hell of a
         | take.
        
           | superkuh wrote:
           | So was, "Facebook is a bad idea." in 2008. But the course of
           | a proprietary social network run by a single corporation only
           | has one outcome. It's just a matter of time.
        
       | brahyam wrote:
       | I believe this incident has been happening for more than 30 mins.
       | I've had problems with gradle pipelines failing without reason
       | for at least the last 6 hours
        
       | alex_g wrote:
       | On a related note, I have been unable to transfer a repo for two
       | weeks now. The sender is able to initiate it but no notification
       | ever appears on my end. If anyone knows how to get the attention
       | of someone at GitHub please let me know. I wish GitHub had a paid
       | support option that was reasonably priced for a single inquiry.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | yarcob wrote:
       | Even though the status page shows all green checkmarks, we are
       | still experiencing issues. The web interface is showing stale
       | data and we can't perform merges in git.
       | 
       | Looks like some of their systems got out of sync and they aren't
       | done resynchronising yet.
        
         | robbyt wrote:
         | Sounds like Azure... Solid 500s from API, but status is green.
        
         | yarcob wrote:
         | Update: After nothing happened, I rewrote the last commit and
         | force pushed to trigger an update. That seemed to do the trick.
         | 
         | I have no inside knowledge, but from the outside it looks like
         | whatever outage they had broke the propagation of commit data
         | from the git repo to to their MySQL database. Maybe they use
         | webhooks for their internal systems as well? That would explain
         | why they first saw issues with webhooks, and later issues with
         | pull requests that might depend on them.
         | 
         | It also looks like after they fixed the issue, they didn't
         | replay the failed notifications. That's why I saw stale data
         | even after they apparently fixed the issue. Then my push to the
         | repo seemed to trigger an update, and now it's back in sync.
         | 
         | I'm curious to hear what really happened, but I doubt this
         | incident is important enough to anyone to warrant a detailed
         | blog post.
        
         | faitswulff wrote:
         | After seeing this happen over and over again, I wonder if
         | status pages should even be run by their own parent companies.
        
       | freakynit wrote:
       | Is anyone facing issue with github pages too? Updated content not
       | getting reflected?
        
       | exikyut wrote:
       | "The world might be ending."
       | 
       | "Update: The world is slightly closer to ending."
       | 
       | "Update: If more thing breaks the world will implode."
       | 
       | "Update: This issue has been resolved."
       | 
       | Me: _[Wonders what happened]_
       | 
       | - Every outage status tracker ever
        
         | drewcoo wrote:
         | But there was customer communication. It's checked off the
         | list, see?
        
         | gkop wrote:
         | A few years ago GH actually had a fairly transparent status
         | page that displayed error rates across components over narrow
         | timeslices. I guess they canned it not too long after their
         | $100M a16z raise.
        
         | WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
         | Because they are glorified marketing pages.
        
         | itsjloh wrote:
         | GitHub generally do monthly uptime reports that go into more
         | detail about any outages they experienced, see the latest one
         | here https://github.blog/2021-02-02-github-availability-report-
         | ja...
        
         | darknavi wrote:
         | One day you'll learn about the one Russian submariner who saved
         | all of our web services from destruction.
        
           | cyberlurker wrote:
           | Reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
        
         | gknoy wrote:
         | I really enjoy seeing the postmortems that some teams publish
         | after these kinds of things.
        
       | edoceo wrote:
       | In other news, folks who are self-hosting GitLab are in great
       | shape. And once the GitHub issues are sorted we can make sure to
       | push to those public end-points of convenience.
       | 
       | Self hosting critical services (email, chat, git, etc) is not a
       | terrible idea. Of course, CBA/risk factor for your team.
        
         | cortesoft wrote:
         | So when your self hosted instance goes down and you are working
         | on it, do your coworkers post message saying "in other news,
         | GitHub.com is in great shape"?
        
           | edoceo wrote:
           | No, cause chat is down too. Solvlem Probbed!
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-08 23:00 UTC)