GitHub Uptime and Microsoft
Recently GitHub reliability has been getting worse. It’s 2020 July 13, Monday and GitHub wasn’t working for around 2 hours. Take a look at their status page. You’ll see something like the screenshot below, taken at 2020-07-13 07:33 UTC.
Millions of individuals and businesses rely on GitHub daily. Having that in mind, I am surprised how GitHub allows such a generous error budget for themselves. For example in April 2020 it went down to 99.67%.
After exploring their historic status page data I noticed one interesting pattern. Since 2014, GitHub had their first outage in November 2018, only a month after Microsoft announced their acquisition was complete. More often and serious incidents started in 2019 December. Whether it’s coincidence or consequence, you decide.
Take a look at historic uptime for Git Operations.
GitHub 3 Years Before Microsoft
2014 November - 2015 January
2015 February - 2015 April
2015 May - 2015 July
2015 August - 2015 October
2015 November - 2016 January
2016 February - 2016 April
2016 May - 2016 July
2016 August - 2016 October
2016 November - 2017 January
2017 February - 2017 April
2017 May - 2017 July
2017 August - 2017 October
2017 November - 2018 January
2018 February - 2018 April
2018 May - 2018 July
2018 August - 2018 October
GitHub Under Microsoft (Acquired in 2018 October)
2018 November - 2019 January
2019 February - 2019 April
2019 May - 2019 July
2019 August - 2019 October
2019 November - 2020 January
2020 February - 2020 April
2020 May - 2020 July
It’s not only Git Operations, but other services too. Explore their uptime page and you’ll see similar pattern. API Requests, Web-hooks, Issues, Pull Requests, Projects were having downtimes even more often than Git Operations.
Let’s hope it’s temporary and GitHub error 500 won’t become their own version of Blue Screen of Death. In this case it would be Green Screen of Death (GSoD or GhSoD).
