Microsoft’s code hosting shack Github has published a lengthy mea culpa about its availability and reliability woes – one that includes the words “we are sorry.”
Developers using the service have faced repeated downtime, and the apology comes days after Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto declared the platform is “no longer a place for serious work”, announcing plans to move his terminal emulator project, Ghostty, elsewhere.
GitHub highlighted several recent incidents in its post. On April 23th, a Merge Queue bug caused merge groups containing more than one pull request to produce incorrect commits.
“In affected cases,” notes GitHub, “changes from previously merged pull requests and prior commits were inadvertently reverted by subsequent merges.”
Then on April 27th, parts of the user interface dependent on search stopped showing results after GitHub’s Elasticsearch cluster became “overloaded (likely due to a botnet attack).” GitHub is still working on a root cause analysis.
The problems are not new. In February, The Register noted that GitHub was struggling with availability. Uptime for the service, according to a reconstructed status page, dropped below 90 percent in 2025, and the trend has been downward. April’s uptime is now below 85 percent.
AI is a factor, according to the source shack: “The main driver is a rapid change in how software is being built. Since the second half of December 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply.”
In between the handwringing, GitHub admits it had planned to up capacity by 10X and said it began work to do this in October 2025. However, by February this year, it became clear that 30 times as much capacity is required. GitHub has since scrambled to deal with the issues.
“Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features. We are reducing unnecessary work, improving caching, isolating critical services, removing single points of failure, and moving performance-sensitive paths into systems designed for these workloads.”
What about the migration to Azure? That is not the culprit. GitHub says the migration has actually helped, allowing it to “stand up a lot more compute” quickly.
Yesterday, Hashimoto complained in a post on his website:
“For the past month I’ve kept a journal where I put an ‘X’ next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an ‘X’. On the day I am writing this post, I’ve been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage.”
GitHub’s apology was penned by Chief Technology Officer, Vlad Fedorov, who closed with: “We hear the pain you’re experiencing. We read every email, social post, support ticket, and we take it all to heart.”
“We’re sorry.”
Restoring developer confidence to pre-crisis levels – when it was the go-to place for stashing code and collaborating on projects – will take more than words.
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