Even that doesn’t really make sense to me, unless they’ve done it in a way where everything has to move at once.

Everywhere I’ve worked, if a migration is causing this much downtime then you kill the migration or slow it down. If every change has a 10% chance of bringing the site down, you only do a change every week or two until you can work out the kinks.

also it should be noted that LinkedIn had a 5 year plan of migrating everything to azure but abandoned it after a year.

Here are some relevant excerpts from an October 2025 article[1]:

> In a message to GitHub’s staff, CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data center. “It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot, which are changing how people use GitHub,” he writes.

> The plan, he writes, is for GitHub to completely move out of its own data centers in 24 months. “This means we have 18 months to execute (with a 6 month buffer),” Fedorov’s memo says. He acknowledges that since any migration of this scope will have to run in parallel on both the new and old infrastructure for at least six months, the team realistically needs to get this work done in the next 12 months.

If you consider that six month parallel window to have started from the time of the October memo (written presumably at the start of October), then that puts us currently or past the point where they would have cut off their old DC and defaulted to Azure only.

Whether plans or timelines changed, I have no idea of course but the above does make for a convenient timeline that would explain the recent instability. Of course, it could also just be symptomatic of increased AI usage generally and the same problems might have surfaced at a software level regardless of whether they were in a DC or on Azure.

Putting that nuance aside, personally I like the idea that Azure is simply a giant pile of shit operated by a corporation with no taste.

[1]: https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

yeah currently working with Azure. what a PITA.

I wonder if the extended downtime is just due to the on-call engineers waiting for their azure auth tokens to refresh within azure's own damn network.

i heard that they asked LinkedIn to do this too and they either refused or their systems were too complex so they refused to. Maybe that explains why LI availability seems ok

Azure, the color of BSOD

they're not just migrating to Azure, they're vibrating to Azure!

That’s not for to … SAP.

Yeah, I think I heard about that. Within certain domains it is certainly a useful tool. I would say things like online search are much nicer now (in that asking an AI is equivalent to searching online but it summarizes it for you). Online search fits the strengths of LLMs nicely, but right now it's being sold as a silver bullet, which it's not.

It's a version of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

One example is the search being broken for CI logs. It takes over your browser's search hotkey too. What happens is every stage of the log is collapsed so the search doesn't work until you trigger the expansion but if you attempt to search before expanding the search will never work after it's been initialized. It's pretty infuriating when you're trying to find something in a giant build log.

Productivity is finite. If you pivot entirely to the AI stack, you're going to lose bandwidth for everything else. It's an opportunity cost problem.

Its had its fair share of outages and outrageous changes that overreach the bounds as well. Its more stable than github is but its had at least 2 sessions of downtime this year that I recall and they were both quite long (day length).

They'd lose a whole lot of users if they killed Java edition, since the modded community is so large. They'd quickly find one of the Minecraft clones reaching feature parity. And there's no good reason for it - it's not like Java is a threat anymore.

They don’t enforce or even default to 2fa to change the account email. In addition, they have no process to get a human to reverse account takeovers. Just a web form that tells you to call a number that redirects you back to a web form

If I remember correctly UK players can no longer chat at all until they verify their ID.

Minecraft is a trick up their sleeve yet to be used. Manipulate and indoctrinate the youth.

It was not nearly as bad... I remember our company migrating to github.com, and believe it or not, it was significant performance/uptime benefit over our self-hosted instance.

(And the first thing to go was occasional 500's on github-hosted files.. the core service itself - git, PR, actions - were pretty stable until recently)

I don't remember that happening so much (if ever) in, say, 2016. But the frequency of noticeable incidents seemingly has been rising steadily since around 2023. The Azure migration apparently only exacerbated it.

I think having a single 9 of uptime is a relatively new thing even for GH

MSFT acquired Skype in 2011, so I would say only a few months:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s...

And a ton of the top end ruby staff have left. Many of them ended up at shopify. There is a growing about of non ruby/rails code at github, but most of the system that people think of when they think github are ruby/rails.

Who was also the last CEO, right? Is this a coincidence?

The best stretch Github ever had was post-acquisition when Nat Friedman as CEO.

Just wait until github comes up with an outage tuesday.

Technucally a set is a subset of itself.

Not that I remember. VS Code was a surprising turnabout for a company that was both adamantly closed and threw FUD around like monkeys in a zoo.

It hosts all the repositories backing applycreatures, we ran dozens of git projects on the same instance, have teams, you guys did a phenomenal work. I would say it's even easy to customise.

https://foja.applycreatures.com

Edit: it has a wonderful API so I posted the link it may tempt some to ditch MS/Azure hub.