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Comment by margalabargala

19 hours ago

You're right. I was misremembering this graph:

https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

Another line on that graph should probably be "January 7, 2019: GitHub offers unlimited free private repos". I can't imagine that helps with service stability.

That is a pretty wild graph

  • There is no way Github had 100% uptime prior to the MS acquisition. Nobody has 100% uptime 100% of the time. They must have changed how they were measuring uptime.

  • Can you explain more of what you mean by "wild" here?

    I never worked on any SaaS that had such high uptime. It seems pretty good to me. In 10 years, it was always better than 99.5% uptime. That seems impressive to me for a huge, complex SaaS like GitHub.

  • Feels like a pretty wildly misleading graph. What do they say about lies, damned lies and statistics?

    This graph is literally designed to abuse correlation =/= causation by attaching the arbitrary label "microsoft acquires github" so that the reader will apply causation to the uptime.

    Now let's overlay ontop of the uptime graph a few lines of: # of monthly active users, # of monthly commits, size of PRs, action minutes per PR (whatever demonstrates scaling)

    Something tells me that the uptime issues follow scale more than they do ownership... but that's not the narrative that this chart was designed for...