Comment by ayewo
3 days ago
Some hard numbers [1] as to why GitHub is struggling with stability issues, directly from GitHub's COO:
Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features.
All of which can be handled with horizontal scaling of identical components.
None of which explains poor latency when opening UI elements, which is more likely be explained by overuse of SPA or spaghetti code in microservices.
Update: yup, that’s exactly it, just as I guessed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912867
This whole thread is so embarrassing for GitHub.
The idea that you would change your product design in this way as a quick fix to solve a performance problem is insane.
This would be like if the battery life on a MacBook Pro was too short so Apple fixed it by removing the screen.
Job’s done, boss!
In a large enterprise if you task a front end team with solving a performance issue that is caused by the back end, invariably they’ll hack together some workaround… in the front end.
People only ever solve problems in the areas they have control over, whether that’s where the root cause is or not.