GitHub’s CTO Vlad Fedorov has posted apologetically about the 17th August outage which, he said, “lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes. It disrupted github.com, authentication, GitHub Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot, affecting developers and organizations around the world.”
As if that is not bad enough, Fedorov also apologised for a failure of Actions on August 6th; and GitHub users will be aware of other incidents over the last few months that have tarnished the company’s reputation as well as being costly for its customers.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft and there is a narrative that says: under Microsoft GitHub has lost its best engineers and is now suffering from that as well as issues with the Azure platform.
There may be something in that, but there are more obvious reasons for GitHub’s difficulties. Specifically, Fedorov states that “since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion.”
That is a rapid growth in demand for a platform that was already under stress. Agentic AI appears to be a large part of the reason. Pull requests and requests are no longer generated mainly by humans, but are now programmatic and therefore created more quickly. In addition, AI-driven development means that it is no longer necessary to be a developer in order to create software projects; more people are creating more software with AI assistance.
GitHub has long had an amazing free offer. Take a look: free plans include unlimited public or private repositories as well as 2,000 CI/CD minutes every month, or unlimited for public repositories. For just $4.00 per month those limits increase. Competitors such as GitLab have reduced their free offer but GitHub has not.
GitHub is Microsoft and can afford it, right? True but free (or too cheap) has a hidden cost, if scaling problems impact paying customers, as has happened.
A way of managing this is to run isolated platforms within GitHub such that an issue affecting some users does not automatically impact all users. It appears that GitHub’s architecture prevents this at the moment.
Part of the answer, as Fedorov discusses, is to improve and expand GitHub’s scalability. A post in April describes this work and includes the comment that “we started working on path to multi cloud,” meaning that Microsoft is willing to pay competitor cloud companies in order to fix these issues.
It seems to me though that Microsoft/GitHub also need to restrain agentic AI by means of quotas and higher prices, in the interests of maintaining the stability of the platform. If that also means reducing the free offer that is understandable; better to have a reliable platform than a free one. Docker, for example, went through this kind of transition, though in that case it was a matter of financial necessity.
In the meantime Cursor (now part of SpaceX) has introduced Origin, now in public beta as a “git forge for storing and sharing code”, which Vicent Martí described in technical detail as Git at any scale. Marti was formerly at Planetscale and before that, GitHub.
The technology is fascinating, but I suspect Cursor also has in mind not to replicate GitHub’s mistake in underpricing its platform.