Comment by elzbardico
4 hours ago
GH was acquired by microsoft some eight years ago. It has been working quite well until recently.
People may have had complaints about functionality, features, commercial issues, but the thing used to at least have a decent uptime until recently.
Has nothing to do with Microsoft acquisition... AI usage has increased demand and load. More PRs, more Action runners, more of everything firing. GitHub just wasn't ready for the scale and are now having issues catching up with it as it continues to increase exponentially.
This is a convenient lie that GH likes to tell. Growth is nothing like exponential, its at most 300% over several years according to their own public numbers (presented misleadingly on graphs)
But a couple of years ago they were crowing about how much work they were doing to prepare for “a billion developers”. If they had actually done that then the actual load from agents should have been no problem.
Is this growth in resource usage or growth in revenue? Because those numbers aren't necessarily coupled. I.e most action runners are free
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Yeah, that and Microsoft has been slow to move the infrastructure to something that scales better to handle that load.
The more surpassing part is that Microsoft hasn't figured out a way to manage/contain the AI-sourced traffic better so it doesn't create all this noisy neighbor problems for non-AI usage/users.
Github's core platform doesn't really make that separation, anything a human can leverage on github an AI agent can as well, just faster and with heavier usage. End of day agents and humans are using the same services.
MSFT is also forcing its subsidiaries to “lean into AI” so that they can fire people to cover for Satya’s bad investments
> It has been working quite well until recently.
I'm not sure how reliable the data is, but average uptime seems to have dipped measurably starting within a year of the aquisition, according to https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
They moved to Azure. Nothing improves on Azure.
It also used to be run as an independent company with access to MS's resources.
Now it's a unit in their AI hype machine.
MSFT was pretty arms length for the first 5-6 years. I was honestly kind of impressed and it made my opinion of MSFT better. But then AI made it too attractive of a target and MSFT couldn't help but make it a place the former CEO wanted to leave (and it has been running headless for about a year now).
It's quite disappointing objectively, but I expected worse from MSFT.