GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

We're a good year+ into the use LLMs for all major bits of software that we all rely upon and GitHub here is down to one 9 of uptime. I've been using GitHub for a _long_ time, my first commits there go back to August 2009!, and I honestly don't recall GitHub going down as much as it has in the last year.

I'm sure there's other things happening in the background, but I can not help but believe that this is directly correlated with the increase of LLM usage.

Though I would love to hear someone else's pet theory how a rock of the internet went from four+ nines of uptime to maybe one.

> 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. And as a fine purveyor of hand-crafted shit code for many years, I'm not gonna weigh in on that.

x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

I have sympathy for the on-call team trying to resolve it, most of us have been there done that.

But seems something is systematically going wrong at GH

We have many agents per employee working in parallel pushing way more commits than was humanly possible before AI, triggering GitHub actions a lot more than the workflows were built for, causing Actions costs to escalate (they really aren't cheap if you compare to hosting it yourself), meanwhile working with YAML workflows is just a pain, and just writing code would be so much more fun and AI compatible[1].

At the same time, GitHub has about ~3 different PR review UIs? And they're all half-bad? Any decently sized PR triggers their "optimized for large PRs" UI which jumps around randomly in my experience. If you don't get that UI and keep the scrolling one (there's an old and a new one btw) then god forbid you click a line number because at some point your browser will randomly scroll back to that line and it won't unstick. Now Linear[2] (and others) is replacing the PR review experience for the agentic era.

I'd love to see a solid AI first Git + CI + reviews.

[1] Cloudflare CI https://blog.cloudflare.com/ci-workflows/

[2] Linear PR reviews https://linear.app/changelog/2025-01-23-pull-request-reviews

https://huggingface.co/blog/github-ci-hf-jobs

I think we need to ask for some money back, this is BONKERS.

Any more of this, and we'll go full Gitlab, like we should have years ago!

Like, everyone talks about how you can just prompt a new CRM instead of paying for Salesforce.

But in this case, I raced with Fable and Sol and had time to build a full featured, fully functional CI/CD workflow system that has most of the features of GitHub actions (not the ecosystem obviously) and costs less than the GitHub runners per minute, while being able to scale to millions of workflows... And I had it working end to end before the outage was resolved and was already running my apps deploys through it.

It would take a little longer to do in a company with red tape and more investments in the GitHub ecosystem, and of course it only replaced actions. But it works.

There is no moat.

I'd love to know what the most common root causes for these outages are.

Aug 06, 2026 - 16:27 UTC - Update - Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.

Aug 06, 2026 - 16:19 UTC - Update - Pages is operating normally.

If the frontier AI used GitLab as a default I'm sure they'd be the ones suffering now.

Especially troublesome in the middle of trying to fix a high score security vulnerability when the release vehicle is Github.

Also, doesn't even have RAG offering.

Even self-hosted runners are impacted.... How can that be?

The cost of this globally has got to be in the hundreds of millions to companies that use CI/CD through GitHub Actions. What if prod is broken and GitHub actions is stalling the deployment of your hotfix? What if this makes your organization miss and SLA and diminish user trust? What if this makes you miss a release that you were contractually obligated to meet? This is happening during peak dev hours on a Thursday (not that it would be acceptable at any other time).

I don't understand how a service this critical to the global technical infrastructure can fail like this at all, let alone for more than a few hours. Like where's the backup generator for crises like these? You can't even use self-hosted runners? WTF? Like how can you not bring your own backup in a crisis event like this?

Not that Microsoft has a good reputation, but holy moly, you'd think they would prepare from something inevitable like this.

latest server i set up is simply a bare repo + hooks to make a local deploy after running tests and shit

super easy to set up having ai do it, zero dependencies, deploy is still 'push it to the main'

i have several remotes for backups and stuff

I was complaining about how I should have used AI instead of manual brainwork for this instead but turns out that might have been the problem.

It was before it became a news and a trend in X.

Really frustrating experience.

It seems to manifest in many places: AI slop, Github outages, recently Miscoroft sent me an email demanding that I subscribe to 365, in order for MS Office (which I already paid for) to continue to work. I simply moved on to the other, free, provider.

Perhaps, it's time to evaluate the use of the Microsoft products?

Or has Microsoft made sure (through Windows licensing terms and pricing) that it's not possible to compete with their own CI offering?

Edit: CircleCI seems to offer 750 minutes/month (whereas GitHub offers 1000 minutes/month).

If you implemented a tool and it worked one time for your presentation to management that's all that mattered.

The actual company employees using it downstream in prod basically had to constantly QA the alpha software they were forced to use and the authors of the tool were hard to track down if they even still worked there. And if you did find the author or the team they would be very resistant to admitting there was an issue because it LOOKED bad.

So many tools I used were fragile and buggy, it was clear the authors just presented the happy path to management to get the note added to their promotion packet and the rest of the company just had to deal with the fallout.

My team implemented this product that the entire company used that was broken and buggy as hell but they kept presenting the product to management as this amazing product and nothing was ever done about how broken it was. One of my team members came from Apple and said Apple's tool to do the same thing was much better. The tool my team worked on was a well known pain point amongst the rank and file but management was very detached from the rank and file, which I guess ultimately was the primary problem.

If Github is having the same issues I feel for them.

Is the AI slop that bad? Culture change?

point clanker to forge.smol. ai/llms.txt

for now its just a fast agent native git remote and u can check docs for the extras.

There is no better time to self-host.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

Now that the calculus has changed, I think we should start asking ourselves whether anyone has the right to unlimited free public repositories.

We can all agree that trying to attribute any single metric to repo quality is subject to Goodhart's Law[1] (e.g. what happened to GitHub stars) yet we can also agree that the Linux Project is a much more vital repository to keep public infrastructure availble for than say, someone's vibe-coded to-do app. Is it impossible then to make any quantitative distinction between these two? We can't have both an uncontrollable firehose of AI slop and unlimited free public storage/compute at the ready for it. I say we actually need to decide what software is worthy of using up these resources for free. We already have companies like JetBrains[2] using dynamic pricing for their products. It's time Github do the same. If you want a hosted VCS for vibe coded projects that aren't being used or depended upon widely, then host the repo yourself.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[2]: https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/

Honestly I dont think I've seen a tool I used regularly with such a moat lose it simply because they cant keep the service up. Also its hard to not see a pretty strong correlation between a bunch of these big companies doubling down on AI and just having their service go to s%#$. We've had similar issues with Digital Ocean recently, which is pretty lined up with them adding a bunch of "inference" services and rebranding the site to add all the "agent" marketing slop. Looking to move to Hertzner when the time allows.

After 6 years of this nonsense of "centralizing everything on GitHub", it is not a good idea at all.

You might as well self host like I said before [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

I'm genuinely curious what changed, what their processes are and how they internally think about their reputation being in the gutter with all these incidents.