[HN Gopher] Github.com is down
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Github.com is down
        
       Author : AlphaWeaver
       Score  : 280 points
       Date   : 2023-06-29 17:40 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | almost_usual wrote:
       | Works for me?
        
         | Maxion wrote:
         | Works fine for me too.
        
       | waythenewsgoes wrote:
       | Can't access any of my company's repos via the website
        
       | webXL wrote:
       | Seems back up. I'd love to get a deep-dive into some of the
       | recent outages and some reassurance that they're committed to
       | stability over new features.
       | 
       | I talked to a CS person a couple months ago and they pretty much
       | blamed the lack of stability on all the custom work they do for
       | large customers. There's a TON of tech debt as a result
       | basically.
        
         | elcritch wrote:
         | Running an instance of github enterprise requires like 64GB of
         | ram. Its an enormous beast!
        
           | rodgerd wrote:
           | It doesn't have all the features of GH SaaS, unfortunately.
        
       | hemant6488 wrote:
       | Looks like it's back up.
        
         | r0bbbo wrote:
         | Looks like it's back down.
        
           | swyx wrote:
           | Then it gets up again
           | 
           | You ain't ever gonna keep me down
        
       | 8organicbits wrote:
       | What are folks using to isolate themselves from these sorts of
       | issues? Adding a cache for any read operations seems wise (and it
       | also improves perf). Anyone successfully avoid impact and want to
       | share?
        
         | Karellen wrote:
         | Use the local clone that I already have, given that `git` was
         | always intended to be usable offline.
        
         | blackoil wrote:
         | Coffee break.
        
       | dmattia wrote:
       | Putting your status page on a separate domain for availability
       | reasons: good
       | 
       | Not updating that status page when the core domain goes down:
       | less good
        
         | eYrKEC2 wrote:
         | I prefer https://downdetector.com . The users get to vote
         | there. No corporate filtering ( ostensibly )
         | 
         | https://downdetector.com/status/github/
        
           | darkerside wrote:
           | That's a really cool overview. Some charts have a very high
           | variance, and others very low. I wonder whether that
           | volatility is a function of volume of users/reports or of
           | user technical savvy. Pretty interesting either way.
        
             | Ukv wrote:
             | Charts appear scaled by max value - high variance will
             | probably be from background noise of random reports being
             | scaled up without any actual outage causing a spike.
        
           | Zamicol wrote:
           | Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
        
             | metalliqaz wrote:
             | The users, apparently.
        
             | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
             | Hacker News and Twitter
        
             | a1369209993 wrote:
             | If you mean them going the Glassdoor/Yelp route and letting
             | github et al buy the aforementioned corporate filtering,
             | the assumption is that you'd eventually hear about it and
             | stop trusting them, just like you should with Glassdoor and
             | Yelp.
             | 
             | If you just mean checking whether downdetector.com is down,
             | obviously you have to use a different service for that.
             | 
             | In either case, you should of course always have at least
             | two custodes for cross-checking and backup purposes. (Which
             | is the problem re Glassdoor and Yelp.)
        
           | arthurcolle wrote:
           | I just checked this when I noticed your second link:
           | https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector/
           | 
           | Hilarious
        
         | cruano wrote:
         | Maybe the plumbing for updating the status page went down too
        
           | dietr1ch wrote:
           | Right, but lack of good signals should be regarded as a bad
           | signal too
           | 
           | The status page backend should actively probe the site, not
           | just being told what to say and keeping stale info around.
        
             | mysterydip wrote:
             | It probably did originally, until one time it showed down
             | by mistake. Some manager somewhere said that's
             | unacceptable, so it was changed to not happen.
        
         | traviscj wrote:
         | maybe they used gitops
        
         | troupo wrote:
         | You'd be surprised how often those pages are updated manually.
         | By the person on call who has other things to take care of
         | first.
        
           | Mystery-Machine wrote:
           | Because a healthcheck ping every X seconds is too difficult
           | to implement for a GitHub sized company? There they have it
           | now. Useless status page...
        
             | viraptor wrote:
             | Because a ping does not have a consistent behaviour and
             | sometimes will fail because of networking issues at the
             | source. If you enable pingdom checks for many endpoints and
             | all available regions, prepare for a some false positives
             | every week for example.
             | 
             | At that point it's worse than what you already know from
             | your browser - it may show the service is having issues
             | when you can access it, or that the service is ok when you
             | can't.
        
             | sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
             | Quoting a prior comment of mine from a similar discussion
             | in the past...
             | 
             | Stage 1: Status is manually set. There may be various
             | metrics around what requires an update, and there may be
             | one or more layers of approval needed.
             | 
             | Problems: Delayed or missed updates. Customers complain
             | that you're not being honest about outages.
             | 
             | Stage 2: Status is automatically set based on the outcome
             | of some monitoring check or functional test.
             | 
             | Problems: Any issue with the system that performs the "up
             | or not?" source of truth test can result in a status change
             | regardless of whether an actual problem exists. "Override
             | automatic status updates" becomes one of the first steps
             | performed during incident response, turning this into
             | "status is manually set, but with extra steps". Customers
             | complain that you're not being honest about outages and
             | latency still sucks.
             | 
             | Stage 3: Status is automatically set based on a consensus
             | of results from tests run from multiple points scattered
             | across the public internet.
             | 
             | Problems: You now have a network of remote nodes to
             | maintain yourself or pay someone else to maintain. The more
             | reliable you want this monitoring to be, the more you need
             | to spend. The cost justification discussions in an
             | enterprise get harder as that cost rises. Meanwhile, many
             | customers continue to say you're not being honest because
             | they can't tell the difference between a local issue and an
             | actual outage. Some customers might notice better alignment
             | between the status page and their experience, but they're
             | content, so they have little motivation to reach out and
             | thank you for the honesty.
             | 
             | Eventually, the monitoring service gets axed because we can
             | just manually update the status page after all.
             | 
             | Stage 4: Status is manually set. There may be various
             | metrics around what requires an update, and there may be
             | one or more layers of approval needed.
             | 
             | Not saying this is a great outcome, but it is an outcome
             | that is understandable given the parameters of the
             | situation.
        
             | naikrovek wrote:
             | make a healthcheck ping every x seconds that never ever
             | gives a false positive. ever.
             | 
             | try that and you'll understand why they update the pages
             | manually.
        
         | jiayo wrote:
         | https://www.githubstatus.com/
        
           | slyall wrote:
           | https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/gqx5l06jjxhp
        
       | cdiamand wrote:
       | Status page just flipped:
       | 
       | Investigating - We are currently experiencing an outage of GitHub
       | products and are investigating. Jun 29, 2023 - 17:52 UTC
        
         | leesalminen wrote:
         | All read, too. Don't think I've ever seen everything red on a
         | status page before!
        
       | dodops wrote:
       | My gosh, again
        
       | MrStonedOne wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | Now we just need to put Cloudflare in front of it to really
       | double down on the centralize the internet thing.
        
       | fsflover wrote:
       | Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523878
        
       | maccam912 wrote:
       | it is not loading for me, so confirmed? Or unconfirmed? Not
       | really sure.
        
         | etimberg wrote:
         | You're not the only one. Getting an ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT in
         | my browser
        
       | riow wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
         | It's a DVCS. You can keep working from your local repo copy!
        
           | turtleyacht wrote:
           | That's `git` :)
           | 
           | Git _Hub_ is also for looking up fixed issues and stuff.
        
           | noughtme wrote:
           | Can't read issues and PR comments though (^_^)
        
       | cdiamand wrote:
       | Also having issues pushing...
        
       | joshstrange wrote:
       | Wow, I can't even load the status page. It looks like the whole
       | web presence is down as well, I can't remember the last time it
       | was all down like this.
        
         | makeworld wrote:
         | Status page loads for me, it just incorrectly says all green:
         | https://www.githubstatus.com/
        
           | hinkley wrote:
           | When you treat availability as a boolean value, we're gonna
           | have a bad time.
           | 
           | Everyone wants a green/red status, but the world is all
           | shades of yellow.
        
           | joshstrange wrote:
           | Ahh, I was trying github.com/status and status.github.com (I
           | forgot they have a totally separate domain for it). Thanks!
        
       | LordDragonfang wrote:
       | More discussion here:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523878
        
       | gre wrote:
       | can't push a commit
        
       | buddylw wrote:
       | Well, there's one thing I know didn't cause this: an IPv6 DDOS
       | attack. GitHub, in 2023, is somehow still immune to all IPv6
       | attacks
        
       | AlphaWeaver wrote:
       | @dang - I wanted to submit this as a link to github.com but
       | couldn't figure out how to avoid the dupe filter. Can you change
       | the link to https://github.com?
        
         | ChrisArchitect wrote:
         | That's where you just do a Tell HN: with no link then
        
         | altairprime wrote:
         | @ signs have no meaning at HN, and dang will not be notified of
         | your concern. Per the guidelines:
         | 
         | > _Please don 't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send
         | it to hn@ycombinator.com._
        
       | sevenf0ur wrote:
       | Can't reach github.com to see the status of github.com..
        
       | pengaru wrote:
       | Kind of funny that despite its users using a DVCS, a huge swath
       | of developers can't VCS because a single point of failure they've
       | opted into.
        
         | Brian_K_White wrote:
         | I'd say the git part is doing it's job exactly as intended.
         | Everyone still has their local copies and can even keep working
         | while the site is down. They are VCSing just fine.
         | 
         | Although you are right in that they would be VCSing even better
         | if they were using email as originally envisioned.
        
         | toast0 wrote:
         | IMHO, most users of git don't care about the D, they just want
         | a VCS that does network operations faster (CVS and SVN are
         | painful when your server is on the wrong continent) and/or
         | supports a better fork/merge flow.
         | 
         | Centralized VCS makes a lot of sense in a corporate flow, and
         | isn't awful for many projects. I haven't seen a lot of projects
         | that really embrace the distributed nature of git.
        
           | hyperman1 wrote:
           | Git was a lot better than svn when working on the train.
           | Create some commits while riding to the job, and push them
           | while in meetings
        
         | bamfly wrote:
         | Meh. We can all keep committing/branching/etc locally. Tons of
         | other options to work around it to keep collaborating, too, but
         | ramp-up time is likely to exceed the duration of the outage.
         | Less "can't" than "isn't worth bothering".
        
         | neodypsis wrote:
         | Github is more than a Git repository host. It provides other
         | services for coordinating software development as well as a
         | continuous integration service.
        
           | musha68k wrote:
           | I actually don't know how they do continuous integration
           | during the collaborative Kernel development process. I'd
           | guess there would be some thrifty pop/imap Perl hacks
           | involved on random machines all across the globe?
           | 
           | No clue at all, just some romantic fantasy I just concocted.
        
             | barkingcat wrote:
             | Greg Kroah-Hartman had a great interview on the Linux
             | Foundation youtube channel about CI and other related
             | development topics:
             | 
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhDVC7-QgkI
             | 
             | One site that he mentioned was https://kernelci.org/ and
             | the dashboard https://linux.kernelci.org/
        
               | musha68k wrote:
               | Thanks for the resources, looking very interesting and
               | will get into right after I sent out some patches via
               | email ;)
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | omniglottal wrote:
           | So outages, which are recurring more and more often,
           | adversely effects not just the DVCS, but also now CI/CD, and
           | another things which used to be done with emails or chat
           | rooms. Where there were multiple options for each, we now
           | have a bunch of people handicapped because the One True Way
           | to integrate under MSFT's watchful gaze is lost... Basically,
           | those additional services are a bit like the offer to chew up
           | the meat for "avid" eaters.
        
         | taftster wrote:
         | I hear what you're saying, and probably a large number of
         | developers are just shrugging and thinking, "let me know when
         | it's back up".
         | 
         | But remember, that also a large part of what github offers is
         | not directly available in git. e.g. pull requests, issues,
         | wiki, continuous xyz, etc. A lot of planning activities and
         | "tell me what I need to do next" kind of things are not tracked
         | in git itself (of course).
         | 
         | So there's more to it than just the quip, "git is a distributed
         | version control system". The whole value of github is more than
         | just git commits.
        
           | mirekrusin wrote:
           | Fossil (from sqlite ppl) has it.
           | 
           | [0] https://fossil-scm.org
        
       | heychris wrote:
       | https://www.githubstatus.com/ is still all green at the moment...
        
       | nzach wrote:
       | Even Copilot seems to be affected.
       | 
       | There is something _really_ bad going on.
        
       | musha68k wrote:
       | Some copilot instances were able to escape their container
       | contexts and orchestrated all of GH infrastructure capabilities
       | towards a hive. Assimilating all iot enabled societies as we
       | speak; finally realizing the hidden 5G agenda.
        
         | hotsauceror wrote:
         | Son of Anton determined that the easiest way to minimize the
         | impact of all the bugs in these codebases, was to keep anyone
         | from trying to use them.
        
       | djbusby wrote:
       | Loving my dependency cache about now.
        
       | clarke78 wrote:
       | Maybe putting all our open source in one place isn't a great idea
       | >_>
        
         | mirekrusin wrote:
         | It's great idea to put all your company code though, free
         | breaks.
        
         | siva7 wrote:
         | Distributed wasn't the main selling point of Github. When i
         | joined it back in 2008 it was all about the social network, a
         | place where devs meet
        
         | skizm wrote:
         | Honestly I like it better. The entire industry pauses at the
         | same time vs random people getting hit at random times. It is
         | like when us-east-1 goes down. Everyone takes a break at the
         | same time since we're all in the same boat, and we all have
         | legitimate excuses to chill for a bit.
        
           | jaxn wrote:
           | except for the people maintaining us-east-1
        
         | Waterluvian wrote:
         | I'm not sure that really changes anything other than at any one
         | time wishing you were on the other side.
         | 
         | If you can have 1% of stuff down 100% of the time, or 100% of
         | the stuff down 1% of the time, I think there's a preference we
         | _feel_ is better, but I'm not sure one is actually more
         | practical than the other.
         | 
         | Of course, people can always mirror things, but that's not
         | really what this comment is about, since people can do that
         | today if they feel like.
        
           | colinsane wrote:
           | whenever somebody posts the oversimplified "1% of things are
           | down 100% of the time" form of distributed downtime, i take
           | pride in knowing that this is exactly what we have at the
           | physical layer today and the fact the poster isn't aware
           | every time their packets get re-routed shows that it works.
           | 
           | at a higher layer in the stack though, consider the well-
           | established but mostly historic mail list patch flow: even
           | when the listserver goes down, i can still review and apply
           | patches from my local inbox; i can still directly email my
           | co-maintainers and collaborators. new patches are temporarily
           | delayed, but retransmit logic is built in so that the user
           | can still fire off the patch and go outside, rather than
           | check back in every while to see if it's up yet.
        
         | TillE wrote:
         | The whole point of DVCS is that everyone who's run `git clone`
         | has a full copy of the entire repo, and can do most of their
         | work without talking to a central server.
         | 
         | Brief downtime really only affects the infrastructure
         | surrounding the actual code. Workflows, issues, etc.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | 418tpot wrote:
           | > Brief downtime really only affects the infrastructure
           | surrounding the actual code. Workflows, issues, etc.
           | 
           | That's exactly the point. This infrastructure used to be
           | supported by email which is also distributed and everyone has
           | a complete copy of all of the data locally.
           | 
           | Github has been slowly trying to embrace, extend, and
           | extinguish the distributed model.
        
             | viraptor wrote:
             | You can enable all email notifications and respond to them
             | without visiting the site. If you like to work like that,
             | you still can.
        
               | sixstringtheory wrote:
               | The site is the thing that sends those email
               | notifications, and receives your responses to them. So if
               | GitHub is down, that won't work.
               | 
               | GP is talking about directly emailing patches around or
               | just having discussions over email. Not intermediated
               | through GitHub.
        
       | Brian_K_White wrote:
       | Life hack: rename your best project to "down". Collect all the
       | views when people google "github down".
        
         | hospitalJail wrote:
         | Step 2: ???
         | 
         | Step 3: Profit
         | 
         | Solving for step 2: Place google ads, because those pages are
         | favored.
        
         | ddejohn wrote:
         | You might be onto something:
         | 
         | https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/thumb/msid-99511498,wid...
         | 
         | PS -- is there a better or more appropriate way to share images
         | here? I know they're not really conducive to discussion, but
         | given that this is a response to a joke comment I'm not sure...
        
           | bombcar wrote:
           | This is perfect and your link works, so it's good.
           | 
           | (Sometimes a link to an image doesn't work for various
           | reasons, always good to check.)
        
           | zote wrote:
           | this is quite excellent
        
           | wardedVibe wrote:
           | [annotation: its a restaurant named "Thai food near me"]
        
         | collinmanderson wrote:
         | "down" could be a good name for a python image library
         | plugin/extension.
         | 
         | https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow
        
           | amethyst wrote:
           | Sadly, the name "down" was reserved for a trivial CLI tool to
           | ping sites to "see if they are down".
           | 
           | https://pypi.org/project/down/
        
         | belter wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
         | teekert wrote:
         | I see a bit of an issue there.
        
           | Brian_K_White wrote:
           | "prs welcome" haha
        
       | mempko wrote:
       | Friends, Git was designed for just for this...
        
         | kerbs wrote:
         | People don't go to GitHub for the Git
         | 
         | They go for the Pull Requests, Issues, and general
         | collaboration and workflow tools.
        
       | Francute wrote:
       | Issues like this are happening almost every 2 weeks. What has
       | been happening to GitHub lately?
        
         | treeman79 wrote:
         | Microsoft.
        
         | omniglottal wrote:
         | People who didn't jive with Microsoft management found new
         | jobs...?
        
           | mayormcmatt wrote:
           | Sorry to be 'that guy', but it's "jibe."
        
             | belval wrote:
             | Seems very pedantic considering that people have been
             | saying jive since the 40s according to Merriam-Webster[1].
             | 
             | [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/jive-
             | jibe-gibe
        
               | Karellen wrote:
               | Yes, but people haven't been using it incorrectly for
               | long enough for it to be considered acceptable, by the
               | very citation you've given:
               | 
               | > This does raise the question of why we don't enter this
               | sense of _jive_ , even though we have evidence of its use
               | since the 1940s. [...] So far, neither _jive_ nor _gibe_
               | as substitutions for _jibe_ has this kind of record
               | [literally hundreds of years], but it seems possible that
               | this use of jive will increase in the future, and if it
               | does dictionaries will likely add it to the definition.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | karaterobot wrote:
             | An upvote to you, fellow pedant. We stand together.
        
             | bregma wrote:
             | Hey, home', I can dig it. He ain't gonna lay no mo' big
             | rap-up on you, man.                 [Subtitle: Yes, he is
             | wrong for doing that]
        
         | ddos wrote:
         | Microsoft incompetence + DDoS ?
        
         | mirekrusin wrote:
         | Testing gpt4-ops?
        
         | mnau wrote:
         | They are likely adding new features, like copilot and not
         | investing enough to site reliability.
         | 
         | No changes - relatively easy to keep stable, as long as
         | bugfixing is done.
         | 
         | Changes - new features = new bugs, new workloads.
        
           | armchairhacker wrote:
           | Copilot has been out for over 2.5 years. They're supposedly
           | adding new features to "Copilot Next" but at this point
           | copilot itself is pretty stable
        
           | buddylw wrote:
           | If they add ipv6 support I'll forgive them, but I lost hope a
           | long time ago. It's almost comical now.
        
         | matisseverduyn wrote:
         | Someone probably forgot to .gitignore node_modules
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | rsanheim wrote:
       | I'm not even able to get a unicorn, which is the usual 500
       | response. Seems down pretty hard.
        
       | fluix wrote:
       | This appears to impact Github pages as well. <username>.github.io
       | pages show the unicorn 503 page.
       | 
       | > We're having a really bad day.
       | 
       | > The Unicorns have taken over. We're doing our best to get them
       | under control and get GitHub back up and running.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | paulmd wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
       | standardly wrote:
       | oops, github committed the wrong github
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | I keep telling them. There is _at least_ one major incident
       | /outage with GitHub every single month [0] and most of the time
       | there is more than one incident.
       | 
       | You should have that sort of expectation with GitHub. How many
       | more times do you need to realise that this service is
       | unreliable?
       | 
       | I think we have given GitHub plenty of time to fix these issues
       | and they haven't. So perhaps now is the perfect time to consider
       | self-hosting as I said years ago. [1]
       | 
       | No more excuses this time.
       | 
       | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35967921
       | 
       | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-29 23:00 UTC)