Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
20% of all GitHub accounts were created in the past 6 months https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2082604368399159542
GitHub's reliability has been going downhill longer than AI has been becoming popular. I feel like the load is becoming the scapegoat.
GitHub’s reliability issues started earlier than the boom in agentic coding they talk about. I have comments on here from 2025 talking about massive outages with actions and issues.
When you're the uncontested market leader, you don't budget operations to be perfectly reliable, you budget to not be too unreliable. All those 9's are expensive after all.
The AI boom caught them napping though, and they're slipping well into the too unreliable category
> The AI boom caught them napping though
Microsoft, who invested eyewatering sums into AI, even near to betting the whole company on an AI boom, is surprised about the AI boom?
Microsoft bet everything on possible AGI, no one thought the result would be a bonafide commit printing machine.
That's not what Nadella said 1-2 years ago. Everyone seemed pretty aware of LLMs soon being able to handle a lot of steps of software development.
I bet it's mostly due to Azure being brittle and the AI boom is just a nice cover story (not saying it's not challenging to handle all that new load) to save face and sell more Azure services.
100% if this post (https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...) is anything to go by, it could explain much of the scaling & reliability issues.Perhaps github not being built to scale this fast + being hosted on azure is closer to the truth.
PRRRR
Microsoft considers it a bonus if a hype lets one department cripple another department.
GitHub uptime is cyclical. It's bad because they won't focus on the core, and then the right users complain and GitHub focuses on core again before it repeats. This is just the latest round exacerbated by vibe coding
Another commenter replied, but was downvoted by angry employees of Microsoft for a fairly anodyne statement.
Microsoft management knows this. It's not like there haven't been attempts to solve these core problems. The issue is GitHub was built by exceptional engineers, and none of those people are still around.
I maintain all these problems began when they migrated off Erlang and egitd. :)
[dead]
It was related to their migration to Azure as far as I know
So they completed the migration? Didn't see that being reported.
I don’t know
I would take what C-level execs say with a grain of salt. Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience. They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
If load was an issue these things would have been solved already. Or they are purposely causing millions of dollars of productivity loss daily by not solving this.
Something more serious is at play. And I want to hear from the actual underlings.
More load does not just mean needing to increase capacity, which would be simple for Microsoft to do.
Additional load reveals limits and breaklines that were never known before - your temporary integer IDs are suddenly too small, you reach the maximum file descriptors in a Linux distro, your hash function suddenly has repeating conflicts, your DB index is suddenly oversaturated.
Having massive exponential growth of your traffic would probably require constant refactoring to meet the ever changing system limits.
A good rule of thumb I once heard (from Jeff Dean, I think) was that (in a complex system) every 10X you go up in scale you need to re-consider basic design elements, trade-offs, etc, and probably change some of them.
It's hard to design something (large and complex) for much more than 10X scale with only HW capacity increases.
> I would take what C-level execs say with a grain of salt.
100% agree.
> Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience.
Not my overall experience 30 years in the industry.
> They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
You'll always be asked to do more with less, at least, that's my own experience.
Also my experience
Also my experience
+1
Also my experience
> They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
Amazing you can say this with a straight face in these DC building times.
Have you tried getting Azure east instances anytime lately?
I've actually never tried to get an Azure instance. Azure can't earn my trust with SSO, let alone hosting my compute.
Infra is a cost center for a business unless your a PaaS and even then maybe still. Cost centers are usually ferreted out for savings, not investment.
Infra is a cost center right up until its absence begins to undercut your value proposition to customers, and then it becomes an investment. GitHub seems well on the wrong side of that equation right now.
In general true. But most of paying customers, including enterprise have made a bet that they cut down expense and resources on operational experience, system management knowledge to minimum because cloud .
So even if these cloud/SAAS solutions perform poorly it is not like customers have wherewithal to create alternate solutions.
> it is not like customers have wherewithal to create alternate solutions.
it's not impossible. they don't, right up until they do
I think owning GitHub is a prestige play, not necessarily thought of as a profit center.
Now however, it's competing for resources directly with the corporations core strategic plans.
GitHub having issues is embarrassing, but the shareholders don't really care.
I've always wondered about that. I've suspected the same as you, it's mostly a brand / "ecosystem" thing.
>They likely also have the money for hardware resources.
Hey man, in case you hadn't heard, the hardware industry is having a lot of trouble keeping up. "Expand our capacity" isn't as easy as it was 2 years ago.
My pet theory is they backed themselves into a corner with Actions. That was a step change in computational scaling effort. It also fell immediately on the heels of the Microsoft acquisition.
Something about these two factors seems to have conspired to wreak absolute havoc on their uptime in the ~7yr hence. The AI slopocalypse hasn't helped matters, but the foundations were laid far earlier.
Would love to hear from an insider, either for or against this conspiracy theory.
My sense is that a lot of this activity isn't even legitimate use. As one example: my company has a GitHub app, and last night some bot added my app to 1700 repos. Then the bot immediately started rapid-firing commits which each affected hundreds of files, triggering a deluge of GitHub webhooks to my servers.
The repo names all matched other GitHub apps, so my sense is this bot had added 1700 GitHub apps to 1700 repos, with that number rapidly increasing at the upper bound of whatever GitHub's rate limit is.
My systems caught it quickly and auto-booted the bot, but the whole situation is ridiculous.
The GitHub bot situation is so frustrating! A good ~50% of community traffic on our repos is spam and bots and to report them I have to fill out a lengthy form and MAYBE GitHub will ban them six weeks later. And I also can't tell whether our repos are being used (and thus worth investing in): GitHib only shows two weeks of traffic data and what they do have is completely useless because they can't filter out bot traffic.
there's this attack on youtube where people who dont want their real names known will autoblock comments with their real names; bots will spam comments with every word and note the ones that were not visible.
kinda reminds me of it. not my most valuable contribution to forensics, admittedly.
This works on only people dumb enough to block only their own name, right?
Yeah I think that's really important. The average value of each commit, action, or hook has become significantly lower, and that necessarily means that they can't spend on quality. If you set the quality bar to cater to the top 10% of value-creating users (us) the amount you'd pay for quality at times when quality matters none would truly and completely sink you
The fools thought we needed data centers for agents, but we actually needed data centers for Github!
COOs lie. There is no chance that MSFT would openly admit that its mandated vibe coding activities at GitHub have failed.
What speaks against the volume activity is that GitHub works perfectly after an outage. People don't just stop AI coding after an outage. If anything, the volume should be higher for people to catch up.
It is more like rebooting a vibe coded WIN-95 because of a vibe coded integer overflow (joke).
I want to believe that it's justification, but looking at the historical uptime [0] (early data is actually overly positive on this graph since it had to scrape historical data instead of realtime), I can't be convinced of this anymore. They do have more load - that's for sure. I just don't believe it's an excuse for their god awful uptime.
[0] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating.
Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? They are handling it a lot better than Github. Just because you have fast growth does not mean you can not handle it.
Instead you have to realize that you are entering into a high growth phase and design around that.
It has been clear that we are in a high growth phase for around a year now and Github still hasn't adapted to that properly.
At some point you have to admit that Github ready for the moment.
GitHub is on Azure. Azure is notorious for being terrible. There was a post here recently from an ex-Azure engineer explaining all of this in a multi-part series.
Edit: Found the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
I didn't think they'd completed the move yet, it's only partially on Azure - which to be fair could be another problem in itself.
Isn't a lot of OpenAI infra also on Azure? They seem to be faring better than GitHub.
I bet OpenAI has failovers to other data centers. I think they have a variety of data center provides all over the place.
There's already a noun for this: "resources"
Q. how can someone publish an article like that, with their name, etc...
Don't they sign NDAs? Do they not care? Are they not enforceable?
Very curious to know.
Maybe they didn’t take the severance part that makes the NDA valid? IIRC for an NDA to be enforceable there has to be a monetary consideration to it. Or maybe it’s for no competes?
Some people reach a level of DGAF where it will not matter
Some fuck-ups have such long-lasting effects that they outlast the NDAs that would cover them
> Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage?
By spending tens of billions in investor cash. It is not clear what a sustainable business model looks like for these companies at the moment.
> They are handling it a lot better than Github.
Are they? Anthropic has fairly frequent issues.
There's high growth and then there's demand increasing 10x in a year. For a mature business like github that's a massive, and I can't think of many big businesses who would be able to scale smoothly to accommodate that kind of demand.
Yes, OAI is losing tens of billions, Anthro is losing billions, and MS is cashflow positive and rewarded for that by Wall St, according to recent earnings reports.
OpenAI and Claude don't accept commits and host PRs? How are they the same?
They're getting increasing demand for tokens at an accelerating pace.
Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though?
Like, I get there are other features they have, and things like history, but I don't think it's quite the same.
Isn't most (not all) of the LLM's resources stateless compute to a large degree?
(Not defending MS at all though, I currently can't create a PR on the required branch for my work (won't load the branch list) and their availability is really bad recently).
> Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though?
Google “RLHF”.
Didn’t knew they did that.
I am pretty sure OpenAI and Claude actually have a higher hardware cost per request that Microsoft. Github is actually most just a standard REST API app, although with some caching and git specific operations in the background. It is not as hardware intensive as GPU-based inference per quest with huge contexts and low latency.
Also Github's feature offering has been incredibly stable for the last 6 years. There isn't an excuse for it to be unstable like this.
Yes, but come on...
That's due to the need for ultra-fast memory and inference compute, it's not the same thing.
Fundamentally, there's incoming requests, an application server, and a database. The devil is in the nature of those requests, and how do you process those requests and stick them in the database. And then serve them back out again. Different application, different database, but fundamentally, it's the same problem. Google managed to do this very well. Microsoft has not.
They're undergoing the same kind of load. Almost every AI commit that's putting pressure on GitHub's servers was written on OpenAI and Anthropic's servers.
Scaling ChatGPT and scaling GitHub are very different problems.
For LLMs, prompt handling is effectively stateless. They do try to route follow-up prompts to the same cluster to benefit from prompt caching, but those can be effectively sharded. They also need to write results to storage but that's on a per-customer basis, so also easy to shard.
GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become instantly available to all readers across all geographies. They have a very different shape of scaling challenge to the LLM vendors.
> GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become instantly available to all readers across all geographies. They have a very different shape of scaling challenge to the LLM vendors.
Github data is accessible by all (if open source), but they should be partition-able by individual repository (and their related forks.). Thus while there is more shared state across users, it isn't fully shared state.
And they have been working on this semi-shared state design for over 10 years now.
Every response from GitHub must be deterministic. OpenAI and Anthropic do not have this problem.
OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Gemeni, etc also have another escape hatch: they can arbitrarily and potentially invisibly reduce your quality of service at their discretion. They can choose to route your request to an expensive model or a cheap one. By contrast, the best Github can do is slow your request down.
Claude has 1 to 2 nines of uptime if you check their uptime history on their site. And I'll note that their definition of up is... generous. Plenty of times I encounter it saying no issues when there are abundant service issues.
OpenAI and Anthropic are spending hundreds of billions of dollars that they may never recoup forcing the building massive new data centers in the face of widespread protest.
You think GitHub ought to match that?
> OpenAI and Anthropic are spending hundreds of billions of dollars that they may never recoup forcing the building massive new data centers in the face of widespread protest.
So has Github's owner Microsoft. It's build out is on par with OpenAI and Anthropic.
> You think GitHub ought to match that?
Microsoft is.
The issue is that the software stack is not stable. That is clearly the issue here.
It isn't a hardware build out issue. It is related to the architecture of Github.
Well they heavily limit free tier usage and for paid users they are charging a tiered pricing model that ramps up very aggressively. Github is a lot more generous in this sense and it has a lot more surface area in terms of the functionality it serves
GitHub is not able to charge in proportion to commits pushed, and can't scale in proportion either without it being too expensive.
For a very long time this year Claude was down multiple times a week. Can’t speak for OpenAI
anthropic frequently rate limits or is just unavailable... so I wouldn't exactly say they are handling it better.
Open AI and Claude were not nearly as mature as Github when the boom started. That's a lot of legacy infra to scale up.
> They are handling it a lot better than Github.
No, they are not.
https://status.claude.com/
https://www.githubstatus.com/
This would require foresight, budget, and attention. MS currently has none of these.
This is the part Github is doing really bad at, it's PR.
Had these DATA and message been tossed around more people wouldn't be so frustrated and would be more understanding.
The obvious answer is to end free unlimited private repos. Source is no longer a specific thing. GitHub is just a free S3 or Azure provider.
A lot of private repos are probably just taking up cheap storage space, not seeing activity that would cause additional load.
You can also limit number of free commits to, say 100 per month.
So if I want to push an existing project with 1000 commits to GitHub for the first time, I gotta do it over the course of 10 months?
Encouraging big commits seems antithetical to the idea of git in general.
I think this would cut out a lot of the mindless commit activity.
Charge $1/month per repo. If your project isn't worth that, run your own git or use another free forge.
The incentives that creates are really bad: it encourages users to organize their code across the smallest number of repos, and I'd bet anything that larger repos are disproportionately more expensive for GitHub than smaller ones. It's very possible that a per-repo charge would make things worse.
You are way too optimistic. What will realistically happen is they charge $2 per month and the quality doesn't change. The $2 per month gross will go where it always goes: launches, exec salaries, shareholders.
I think GitHub leans on this free repos thing a lot for getting new users though. Like I could see people just moving to GitLab
Free private repos on github is relatively new, only introduced after a rise in popularity of gitlab (which has free private repos).
Seems like github is too popular for itself.
I know you said "relatively", but it's been seven and a half years: https://github.blog/changelog/2019-01-08-pricing-changes/
…and encountering the same issues most likely.
Fair, but the point is GitHub’s model is:
Free Users use GitHub => when a company needs source control => all their coders use GitHub => company buys expensive enterprise contract.
If there’s less of an advantage to using free GitHub then that funnel works less effectively.
GH isn't good enough to charge that much for its core services. 90% of its user base would just find better or cheaper alternatives, and the only ones remaining would be legacy enterprise codebases that are just impossible or too expensive to migrate.
What about $1/year per private repo?
80/20 rule would suggest that you don't need to apply $1 to all users, just those who create an excessive number of AI slop repos or make an excessive number of commits.
Could do similar for GH actions usage.
Public or private doesn't matter. Vibe coders aren't worried about others using their AI slop
I would have thought it's public repos that got the most AI slop recently as a form of gathering karma and boost CVs. It would be nice to know if private repo commits increased instead.
I'm curios what is the bottleneck then? Because github(ms) has enough resources to hire competent people and provision needed hw to solve scaling the issues.
Ignoring the possibility of plain ol' management incompetence, when things are changing as fast as they are the problem becomes one of lead time. Hiring competent people does not happen at the click of a finger, nor in the current climate does getting new hardware resources.
Hardware probably isn't going to do a lot with demand rising 10x or more at peak times, if they had scaled and tested systems with a view to supporting an order of magnitude more requests than expected then all that contingency resource is already gone. Adding 10% more hardware is going to be very expensive and will likely not have that much effect anyway without design changes to make better use of that hardware, scaling by orders of magnitude often reveals bottlenecks that were not apparent at the previous scales, or were apparent but dismissed (I imagine somewhere in a comment or design doc someone having written “we will need to rethink this if the system is to be asked to process 10ˣ⁺¹ things/period rather than 10ˣ”).
And once you've hired those people, even if they get up to speed pretty much instantly, a system change isn't going to be designed/made/rolled-out in short order so patchwork fixes are still needed in the meantime, and any roll-out probably needs to be gradual which adds further complication.
Scaling isn't easy. Scaling fast is a royal PITA.
need competent people to hire competent people first - it seems like their only directive is to raise $MSFT not make good tech
(talking about leadership, not my lovely msft engineers reading this)
Looking at the design of Github Actions, I don't see any competency.
Yeah, aren't they super geniuses with infra that scales with a button, etc.?
> infra that scales with a button
That is how Microsoft markets Azure. :-)
Probably contention on databases.
Github is owned by Microsoft, its not like its some boostrapped startup who has a closet of servers that are melting.
And on top of that, Microsoft is one of the companies that created this problem in the first place.
Nobody at Microsoft could've predicted AI was going to be so popular!
Like the way that they shipped ‘95 without a browser?
> Like the way that they shipped ‘95 without a browser?
Around the time when Windows 95 was released, Microsoft did predict that the internet will become popular also among private users. That is why
- they included Winsock (Windows' TCP/UDP/IP stack) as native part of Windows 95 (in opposite to Windows 3.x where you had to install a third-party implementation of the Winsock API such as Trumpet Winsock), though it was typically not installed by default,
- support to use MSN (the dial-up online service and internet servicen provider [1]) was pre-installed with Windows 95.
What was not clear at that time was that the world wide web would become the killer application for the internet for consumer users (at that time, the more likely killer application of the internet for consumers was seen in proprietary content providers such as AOL, Compuserve or MSN), so Microsoft provided no web browser with the original version of Windows 95.
But even at that time, it was conceivable, though not clear that the world wide web could become important. So, already at the release time of Windows 95, Microsoft provided Internet Explorer 1.0 as part of the Plus! add-on pack for Windows 95. With Windows 95 OEM Service Release 1, the Internet Explorer 2.0 got part of Windows 95, and Windows 98 introduced the (optional) Active Desktop [2], in was centered around the Internet Explorer.
So, in my opinion Microsoft did everything "correct" here: they provided Internet Explorer from beginning on as an optional separate component (Plus! add-on pack), and once it was obvious that the world wide web would become very important, they reacted fast and included the Internet Explorer in the next service release of Windows 95 (Windows 95 OEM Service Release 1).
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-Up_Internet_Access
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop
I can't believe they've been asleep all these months, not foreseeing that AI would generate more commits and Git usage and, consequently, not preparing themselves to scale.
That is 455 commits per second. I know that's not qps over the system but it's not that huge of an input number either. Not for big tech like msft.
That doesn't answer the question at all. I suspect most components are already horizontally scalable, if not, which ones? That would be an interesting discussion for HN.
That is a good point. And this issue looks analogous to what is happening in the research publication world (arxiv, peer-review, etc). In particular, I wonder whether code pushed is of lesser quality, CI pipelines break more often too, and this saturates github servers.
Turns out that the cloud doesn’t scale that easily by itself after all?
> Turns out that the cloud doesn’t scale that easily by itself after all?
The cloud does scale that easily, the software doesn't. :-)
If that's the superficial cause, then the root cause is a lack of limits. Any production system in the world will go down from too much load if you don't limit the load. You have to do performance testing to determine what the system's peak utilization is, and put limits in place to prevent exceeding that limit.
There are multiple kinds of limits you need. First you need the raw i/o limits on things like networking, load balancer requests per second, etc so you don't slow to a crawl on high load; you can throttle max i/o so demanding users don't steal performance for others, or even throttle network traffic to the client IP and internal services. Then you need additional limits at app layer, like number of requests you can process that make DB calls (as most DBs have a connection and request limit), or limit API requests to X/minute. Then you need more business logic limits, like max number of concurrent logged-in users, max number of repos a user can have, max number of requests for free users, priority for paid requests, etc.
When you hit a limit, you have a couple choices. You can shed load (dropping calls immediately, which results in 503 errors for users, or even network disconnects), but it makes a very poor user experience, and can cause larger issues/conflicts in a distributed system. You can instead keep a max number of active sessions, and adjust that number over time, to ensure that (on average) your users have a stable experience; this requires implementing a "waiting room" for new sessions when old ones expire or log out; still not great for users, but it prevents everyone from getting random errors, which means the majority of users have a good experience.
There are way more kinds of limits to implement. Each business has to analyze its entire system to identify performance bottlenecks and implement limits to ensure the majority of users continue to have good service. Without those limits, you get a shit experience for everyone, your brand is tarnished, and customers run for the hills.
Finally, the performance testing helps you plan how much infrastructure you need to serve a given number of users. If you plan properly, you know X infra allows for Y number of users. Once you exceed Y users, you need to start throttling or stopping new user signup (and requests per minute) until you can increase capacity. Continuing to allow signups and additional usage, without the capacity to support it, results in what we see today.
But competent engineers know all this. If they had competent engineers, and it gets this bad anyway, the problem is management. Microsoft likely already made back what they acquired GitHub for. They probably figured they could keep riding the gravy train until the train went off the rails, and either eventually sell GitHub or write it off. Such is business.
I really enjoyed this read, as I am starting to grapple with some of this now. Do you have any resources for learning more about this stuff and these tradeoffs?
> until the train went off the rails
Ironically the core application is written in rails, which may be part of the issue
I think that data is a bit dated and misleading, but I would love to see if AI slop is a contributing factor here once the dust settles and how Github will address it. Looking at the return to mean in https://areyougoingexponential.rhys.dev/kdaigle makes me think the COO spike could be a Karpathy wiki or an agent too.
Are these disproportionately in the free tier? Or is the increased storage load similar across the paid tiers?
Might be worth considering a /GB/MO fee. Let's face it, VCS is a (glorified) storage service.
I think Github should start charging who goes beyond fair usages.
I just checked no 1 vibe coder https://github.com/steipete and he has like 279,440. Compared this to Taylor who works on huge project like Laravel and is only around 8k commits.
The scam that anthropic pulled, is they remove free tier (bad idea for Github honestly), but blame it on AI vibe code abusers. Instead of for example finding the 1-5% of absolutely aggregous users like Steipete and restricting them.
it's a bit of a stretch to call removing a free tier a scam. as you can see a lot of people in this thread are saying Github should start charging.
It is just an excuse. If they can't support paid member or don't have infra they should start charging these slop projects who are committing relentlessly.
> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year,
OK so then use the additional revenue to add more resources and employees? What the f*k are they doing over there?
> OK so then use the additional revenue to add more resources and employees?
What revenue? I'd assume the people pushing thousands of AI-generated commits are not the people paying for GitHub Enterprise.
> What revenue
I'd assume at least a portion of them are paying for GitHub Pro, and by now at least a small % would have converted to Enterprise.
If not, then they need to fix their operational model - I don't understand people acting like this is some insurmountable challenge given Microsoft reported over $331 billion in total revenue and an operating income exceeding $155 billion in 2026.
Changing the operating model can be surprisingly tough for an established business. Imagine the outcry if they started charging per git push, for example.
Clearly, something needs to change. But if they're not careful they might provoke a reaction from their existing userbase that's even more negative that the response to these outages.
Sure, but max 100 pushes per day per account? Or should it be higher?
> can be tough
Of course it can - everything is tough at that scale, but their parent company has billions in profit. They've had a year to come up with a plan/fix and have failed miserably.
What revenue do AI-boosted commits provide? Am I missing something?
You're missing the fact that Microsoft reported over $331 billion in total revenue and an operating income exceeding $155 billion - this is a fixable problem.
If they're really that cash-strapped at GitHub, then are they planning to just continue allowing this to happen and drown, or fix the issues? This has been ongoing for over a year.
So why did all the Azure and Github engineers leave then? There's only management and outsourced cheap labor there, and management has no idea. Cheap labor even less
Is there additional revenue from a bunch of people pushing their vibe-coded stuff up to Github?