I’ve noticed most posts and replies are just people coming to their own conclusions based on whatever published data.
I think it would be helpful to get some actual, non-corporate/marketing information on the goings-on by those that actually see what’s happening on the inside.
Thanks
Can
Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
20% of all GitHub accounts were created in the past 6 months https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2082604368399159542
If load was an issue these things would have been solved already. Or they are purposely causing millions of dollars of productivity loss daily by not solving this.
Something more serious is at play. And I want to hear from the actual underlings.
100% agree.
> Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience.
Not my overall experience 30 years in the industry.
> They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
You'll always be asked to do more with less, at least, that's my own experience.
Charge $1/month per repo. If your project isn't worth that, run your own git or use another free forge.
Seems like github is too popular for itself.
Free Users use GitHub => when a company needs source control => all their coders use GitHub => company buys expensive enterprise contract.
If there’s less of an advantage to using free GitHub then that funnel works less effectively.
Could do similar for GH actions usage.
Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? They are handling it a lot better than Github. Just because you have fast growth does not mean you can not handle it.
Instead you have to realize that you are entering into a high growth phase and design around that.
It has been clear that we are in a high growth phase for around a year now and Github still hasn't adapted to that properly.
At some point you have to admit that Github ready for the moment.
Edit: Found the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
Also Github's feature offering has been incredibly stable for the last 6 years. There isn't an excuse for it to be unstable like this.
That's due to the need for ultra-fast memory and inference compute, it's not the same thing.
Like, I get there are other features they have, and things like history, but I don't think it's quite the same.
Isn't most (not all) of the LLM's resources stateless compute to a large degree?
(Not defending MS at all though, I currently can't create a PR on the required branch for my work (won't load the branch list) and their availability is really bad recently).
For LLMs, prompt handling is effectively stateless. They do try to route follow-up prompts to the same cluster to benefit from prompt caching, but those can be effectively sharded. They also need to write results to storage but that's on a per-customer basis, so also easy to shard.
GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become instantly available to all readers across all geographies. They have a very different shape of scaling challenge to the LLM vendors.
Github data is accessible by all (if open source), but they should be partition-able by individual repository (and their related forks.). Thus while there is more shared state across users, it isn't fully shared state.
And they have been working on this semi-shared state design for over 10 years now.
You think GitHub ought to match that?
So has Github's owner Microsoft. It's build out is on par with OpenAI and Anthropic.
> You think GitHub ought to match that?
Microsoft is.
The issue is that the software stack is not stable. That is clearly the issue here.
It isn't a hardware build out issue. It is related to the architecture of Github.
By spending tens of billions in investor cash. It is not clear what a sustainable business model looks like for these companies at the moment.
> They are handling it a lot better than Github.
Are they? Anthropic has fairly frequent issues.
There's high growth and then there's demand increasing 10x in a year. For a mature business like github that's a massive, and I can't think of many big businesses who would be able to scale smoothly to accommodate that kind of demand.
No, they are not.
https://status.claude.com/
https://www.githubstatus.com/
The repo names all matched other GitHub apps, so my sense is this bot had added 1700 GitHub apps to 1700 repos, with that number rapidly increasing at the upper bound of whatever GitHub's rate limit is.
My systems caught it quickly and auto-booted the bot, but the whole situation is ridiculous.
kinda reminds me of it. not my most valuable contribution to forensics, admittedly.
Might be worth considering a /GB/MO fee. Let's face it, VCS is a (glorified) storage service.
I just checked no 1 vibe coder https://github.com/steipete and he has like 279,440. Compared this to Taylor who works on huge project like Laravel and is only around 8k commits.
There are multiple kinds of limits you need. First you need the raw i/o limits on things like networking, load balancer requests per second, etc so you don't slow to a crawl on high load; you can throttle max i/o so demanding users don't steal performance for others, or even throttle network traffic to the client IP and internal services. Then you need additional limits at app layer, like number of requests you can process that make DB calls (as most DBs have a connection and request limit), or limit API requests to X/minute. Then you need more business logic limits, like max number of concurrent logged-in users, max number of repos a user can have, max number of requests for free users, priority for paid requests, etc.
When you hit a limit, you have a couple choices. You can shed load (dropping calls immediately, which results in 503 errors for users, or even network disconnects), but it makes a very poor user experience, and can cause larger issues/conflicts in a distributed system. You can instead keep a max number of active sessions, and adjust that number over time, to ensure that (on average) your users have a stable experience; this requires implementing a "waiting room" for new sessions when old ones expire or log out; still not great for users, but it prevents everyone from getting random errors, which means the majority of users have a good experience.
There are way more kinds of limits to implement. Each business has to analyze its entire system to identify performance bottlenecks and implement limits to ensure the majority of users continue to have good service. Without those limits, you get a shit experience for everyone, your brand is tarnished, and customers run for the hills.
Finally, the performance testing helps you plan how much infrastructure you need to serve a given number of users. If you plan properly, you know X infra allows for Y number of users. Once you exceed Y users, you need to start throttling or stopping new user signup (and requests per minute) until you can increase capacity. Continuing to allow signups and additional usage, without the capacity to support it, results in what we see today.
But competent engineers know all this. If they had competent engineers, and it gets this bad anyway, the problem is management. Microsoft likely already made back what they acquired GitHub for. They probably figured they could keep riding the gravy train until the train went off the rails, and either eventually sell GitHub or write it off. Such is business.
OK so then use the additional revenue to add more resources and employees? What the f*k are they doing over there?
What revenue? I'd assume the people pushing thousands of AI-generated commits are not the people paying for GitHub Enterprise.
I'd assume at least a portion of them are paying for GitHub Pro, and by now at least a small % would have converted to Enterprise.
If not, then they need to fix their operational model - I don't understand people acting like this is some insurmountable challenge given Microsoft reported over $331 billion in total revenue and an operating income exceeding $155 billion in 2026.
Clearly, something needs to change. But if they're not careful they might provoke a reaction from their existing userbase that's even more negative that the response to these outages.
Of course it can - everything is tough at that scale, but their parent company has billions in profit. They've had a year to come up with a plan/fix and have failed miserably.
If they're really that cash-strapped at GitHub, then are they planning to just continue allowing this to happen and drown, or fix the issues? This has been ongoing for over a year.
The downtime also starts happening in 2020, which is a while after the acquisition. 2020 was the year many people started learning to code while being stuck at home.
lol ... That is absolutely hilarious ... I'm not sure if it is /s, but if this is true, enterprise stupidity has reached a new level.
https://x.com/mariorod1/status/2085800861469495465
I really think something deeper is going wrong there, and they're not being honest with their paying customers (and enterprises) about it.
- GitHub attempting (and seemingly failing) to move to Azure infrastucture for its website backend
- AI generated code wrecking the site due to the volume of activities.
Does the AI ever look back at the shit trail it left behind?
Diffs are no longer diffs, they look like largescale delete and rewrite
HN Search: azure capacity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Azure Capacity Crunch Extends into 2026 Amid Data Center Constraints - https://windowsforum.com/threads/azure-capacity-crunch-exten... - October 9th, 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427779
Pick one!
How many non Ruby apps and all the databases and systems behind could climb their traffic 14x when they probably only perf-tested for a sustained 2-3x and, and paid for a profitable amount of rack space rather than a “lol, VC money, we’ll 10x later” amount of infra.