7 ms·

Github has published some incredible usage rate increase numbers, which they ascribe to the rise of agentic coding. At some point, they are going to have to cha

Github has published some incredible usage rate increase numbers, which they ascribe to the rise of agentic coding. At some point, they are going to have to change rate limits, cut free-tier usage, or find some other path to reducing load. It's clear that their infrastructure can't keep up with this significant increase, and it's unlikely that they're going to just absorb the increased costs themselves. Very curious to see what the future holds for Github.

pier25 5mo ago
Amazing that Microsoft didn't see this coming after aggressively pushing AI everywhere for years.
cdrnsf 5mo ago
They can't really cite the situation as a problem given their hand in creating and continuing it.
- petcat 5mo ago
  The sysadmins didn't make any of those decisions.
  - cdrnsf 5mo ago
    I suppose the idiocy of their parent company is their job security.
- nine_k 5mo ago
  It's hard to talk about "them" as a singular entity. I bet that the "Copilot all the things!!11" faction mostly does not consist of GitHub SREs.
  - Hamuko 5mo ago
    The GitHub SREs are working for the Copilot company.
    - cdud3 5mo ago
      Satya Nadella at the LlamaCon event in April 2025: "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software." In particular Github, with it's copilot-next initiative, has probably so much AI generated code inside today that fixing all this new performance problems will need lots of human developer brains.
      - PunchyHamster 5mo ago
        It literally have problems the moment MS bought it, way before AI gold rush.
graypegg 5mo ago
IMO, they're reaching the point of no return. I don't think they can horizontally-scale their way out of the hole they dug themselves unless they separate their free and paid infra maybe... which doesn't seem likely considering how their other infra changes are going. In the same way you need to be 10x better for someone to consider switching to your product, if you get 10x worse your competitors get a free 10x by just standing still.
- AlexB138 5mo ago
  I think there's a very good chance you're right. Their reputation is obviously severely harmed, and high profile projects like Ghostty leaving may be a canary in the coalmine. Something creative like separating their free and paid tiers may help them. I suspect the fact that all of this is happening to them along with their migration to Azure is probably complicating their ability to adapt their infrastructure.
  - bastardoperator 5mo ago
    What if I told you most enterprise customers don't even use the cloud offering and aren't impacted by any of this? Companies like Apple use GHES, and honestly thats where most of their revenue comes from, not the free offering.
- dylan604 5mo ago
  I wonder if AWS resurrecting CodeCommit might be related. "For all of our warts, we still have a higher rep score than github" would not be an extraordinary thought at this point. There has been some brief chat about looking to github, and I'm so glad we never did. A previous company did migrate to github with no real answers on what the benefit was other than investors ask if your code is in github by name vs some other repo.
- jcgrillo 5mo ago
  IIRC back in the day they used to have an on-prem Enterprise product? I've never heard of anyone who actually used it though. IMO that would make a lot of sense for a medium-large organization--you still get the familiar Github product but you can take responsibility for your own uptime--like with Jira, Jenkins (nee Hudson), PyPI/Maven/etc.
bdashdash 5mo ago
Isn't the data that flows through Github so valuable that they (Microsoft) are happy to eat the cost? I don't have a clear idea how that value can be captured, since it's going to be 90% AI generated code that anyone can scrape (public projects) or can't be used (private projects), so perhaps you're right.
- Athas 5mo ago
  > Isn't the data they capture so valuable that they (Microsoft) are happy to eat the cost? Even if that is true, unless the value of the data corresponds to near-term revenue, then eventually the cost may simply not be possible to meet. Or for that matter, the capital to manage the increasing load may simply not exist - it does not matter how much valuable data you have, if the supply of hardware cannot keep up with your demand. Also, I suspect that most of the "data" obtained by the incessant hammering on GitHub is not very valuable. Most business code is routine, and getting Copilot to help out with generating enormous amounts of it may not contribute much in return.
- petcat 5mo ago
  > 90% AI generated code And it isn't even clear yet if the AI generated code is even particularly valuable since it's legally ambiguous as to whether or not any human ownership can be attributed to it. The USPTO has declined copyrightability for genai artwork, it's only a matter of time before the same question comes up about code.
  - graemep 5mo ago
    Your claim is incorrect. Something purely AI generated may not be covered by copyright in the US. That would make it more valuable to MS as you can reuse it as you like. However, works with significant human input are covered by copyright, and most code does have such input. Human review, and correction is very common. There is a lot of AI generated code out there, and there are no cases challenging the copyright on it. You also need to look beyond US law. Software is a global business and most software businesses do not want to write software they can only sell in certain countries.
pydry 5mo ago
Github naturally scales horizontally. Usage numbers is the PR reason. Vibecoding insanity in Microsoft is the more plausible actual culprit.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
  So maybe it's AI that's responsible for both ends. The increased traffic and the lessened product.
- sofixa 5mo ago
  > Github naturally scales horizontally Not necessarily, a few years ago they had some crucial information stuck in a single MySQL cluster (so write constrained) and were working on sharding it, but struggling: https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/partitioning-githubs-relational-databases-scale/ https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/partitioning-...
amluto 5mo ago
For literally decades, I’ve observed that there are systems that make each operation cheap and systems that work hard to scale out. The former frequently seems to wildly outperform the latter. GitHub, for example, seems to implement the main repository /pulls page as a search query, which is hinted at by the prefilled search bar and was mostly confirmed last week when the search backend failed and pull requests didn’t load. But it could have been implemented as a plain API call that just loads open pull requests, and that API exists and did not go down. If GitHub focused a bit on identifying their top 95% of high level operations (page loads including resulting API calls, for example) and making them efficient, I bet they could get a 5x or better reduction in backend load by simplifying them. (Don’t even get me started on the diff viewer. I realize that much of its awfulness is the horribly inefficient front end, which does not directly load the back end, but I expect there is plenty of room for improvement. The plain git command line features are very fast.)
- the_sleaze_ 5mo ago
  I think you need to broaden your focus here - I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories. Microsoft bought Github and migrated to Azure, which is explains the findings. The query performance was fine before they started serving from Azure. I mean honestly, as though there isn't one single person competent enough to read some logs and horizontally scale a few read only dbs to meet demand? That's not it
  - AlexB138 5mo ago
    > I think you need to broaden your focus here - I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories. This is the opposite of my recollection, actually. I distinctly remember having conversations about Github struggling to scale well before MS was involved, and people claiming that MS had somehow saved Github because it had stabilized and begun adding features again. > The query performance was fine before they started serving from Azure. This may be correct though. The Azure migration seems more aligned with the timeline of struggling to scale.
eddyg 5mo ago
From the GitHub COO on April 3rd: Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.) GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week. So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features. https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 They also had a recent blog post about availability: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-... I don't envy the scaling issues the GitHub engineers are facing! #HugOps
- wolfi1 5mo ago
  I wonder how many of those actions are really necessary
  - bravetraveler 5mo ago
    Or how many pushes those commits are spread across; oh, neat, big number.
  - PhilipRoman 5mo ago
    And how many of those actions do uncached downloads instead of building self-contained offline images... Speaking of which, I wonder if GitHub has implemented any HTTP interception for common mirror sites, like used by apt, etc.
    - spockz 5mo ago
      Many downloads now go over https. Intercepting them would require having certificate for those domains. IIRC on the clouds the standard images do have a sources list that points to mirrors on the cloud’s network. I would only presume Github Actions runners have the same. Not sure if something similar exists for NPM which is big for all things JS.
elAhmo 5mo ago
Can you share where did they published that?
- AlexB138 5mo ago
  Their COO has talked about it extensively on X. A sibling comment in this thread posted a link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011075
mohsen1 5mo ago
The same company operates the Xbox network. More daily active users and more events per second
- incognito124 5mo ago
  Xbox network was _designed_ for such concurrency, GitHub is Ruby on rails + vitess (mysql).
- steve1977 5mo ago
  Do they run Xbox network on Azure or is it a separate thing?
- brian-armstrong 5mo ago
  Not comparable at all. Xbox would be mostly transient traffic. It's probably not much more than packet forwarding for a lot of traffic. Github is a giant complicated stateful mess with a lot of reads and writes. It also has a lot of features at this point. Hard to scale and hard to optimize.
  - pathartl 5mo ago
    I think this is minimizing the Xbox platform. They are also a massive digital distribution platform where almost every game is a digital download now. That being said, you are correct. It is absolutely no surprise to me that Actions has the worst uptime.
sh3rl0ck 5mo ago
I've been a strong proponent of reallocating all LinkedIn server capacity to GitHub.
- dijksterhuis 5mo ago
  this is an idea that i’d happily get behind.
- bachmeier 5mo ago
  [flagged]
crote 5mo ago
It's a bit hard to blindly trust their numbers when they are trying very hard to sell Copilot to everyone. Sure, AI will undoubtedly have increased their workload, but how much of the shown figures is real, and how much is the PR department trying to make it look like Copilot & friends is a massive success?
amarant 5mo ago
Huh, so vibe coding really is the reason GitHub has been down so much lately!
munk-a 5mo ago
Have they published incredible usage rate numbers somewhere? I saw their recent blog post about the outages[1] and it has a graph without axis labels and without any context around usage before 2019 to indicate just how much this agentic acceleration has actually increased usage growth. 1. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
kqp 5mo ago
A week ago GitHub published a blog post saying this, a day later GitHub execs were in HN comments repeating it, and just like that it’s common knowledge that GitHub’s steady reliability decline from the 2019 onward was actually caused not by the 2019 Microsoft integration, but by something that did not exist until 2023. PR works, y’all. Turns out the reason GitHub doesn’t work is because it’s just so good!
shevy-java 5mo ago
It means that Skynet is winning. What you described above will piss off and alienate even more people. Eventually there will be a critical threshold crossed. Microslop will be the first victim of Skynet 11.0 (I lost track of its current version but you can see how much damage is caused by AI in general now - this was the beginning of skynet. Except that it sucks).
cedws 5mo ago
The disappointing thing is that if you do some digging, you'll find the majority of that it's slop and just outright spam. There's a page on GitHub where you can see recently updated repositories and it's very rare I see anything of quality on there. GitHub has become a dumping ground for broken code and it has more bots than ever. As much as I hate ID verification it might be a necessarily evil at this point because clearly their anti-bot measures aren't working.
faangguyindia 5mo ago
Youtube does not suuffer from rise in AI videos?

pier25 5mo ago

Amazing that Microsoft didn't see this coming after aggressively pushing AI everywhere for years.

cdrnsf 5mo ago

They can't really cite the situation as a problem given their hand in creating and continuing it.

petcat 5mo ago
The sysadmins didn't make any of those decisions.
- cdrnsf 5mo ago
  I suppose the idiocy of their parent company is their job security.
nine_k 5mo ago
It's hard to talk about "them" as a singular entity. I bet that the "Copilot all the things!!11" faction mostly does not consist of GitHub SREs.
- Hamuko 5mo ago
  The GitHub SREs are working for the Copilot company.
  - cdud3 5mo ago
    Satya Nadella at the LlamaCon event in April 2025: "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software." In particular Github, with it's copilot-next initiative, has probably so much AI generated code inside today that fixing all this new performance problems will need lots of human developer brains.
    - PunchyHamster 5mo ago
      It literally have problems the moment MS bought it, way before AI gold rush.

graypegg 5mo ago

IMO, they're reaching the point of no return. I don't think they can horizontally-scale their way out of the hole they dug themselves unless they separate their free and paid infra maybe... which doesn't seem likely considering how their other infra changes are going. In the same way you need to be 10x better for someone to consider switching to your product, if you get 10x worse your competitors get a free 10x by just standing still.

AlexB138 5mo ago
I think there's a very good chance you're right. Their reputation is obviously severely harmed, and high profile projects like Ghostty leaving may be a canary in the coalmine. Something creative like separating their free and paid tiers may help them. I suspect the fact that all of this is happening to them along with their migration to Azure is probably complicating their ability to adapt their infrastructure.
- bastardoperator 5mo ago
  What if I told you most enterprise customers don't even use the cloud offering and aren't impacted by any of this? Companies like Apple use GHES, and honestly thats where most of their revenue comes from, not the free offering.
dylan604 5mo ago
I wonder if AWS resurrecting CodeCommit might be related. "For all of our warts, we still have a higher rep score than github" would not be an extraordinary thought at this point. There has been some brief chat about looking to github, and I'm so glad we never did. A previous company did migrate to github with no real answers on what the benefit was other than investors ask if your code is in github by name vs some other repo.
jcgrillo 5mo ago
IIRC back in the day they used to have an on-prem Enterprise product? I've never heard of anyone who actually used it though. IMO that would make a lot of sense for a medium-large organization--you still get the familiar Github product but you can take responsibility for your own uptime--like with Jira, Jenkins (nee Hudson), PyPI/Maven/etc.

bdashdash 5mo ago

Isn't the data that flows through Github so valuable that they (Microsoft) are happy to eat the cost? I don't have a clear idea how that value can be captured, since it's going to be 90% AI generated code that anyone can scrape (public projects) or can't be used (private projects), so perhaps you're right.

Athas 5mo ago
> Isn't the data they capture so valuable that they (Microsoft) are happy to eat the cost? Even if that is true, unless the value of the data corresponds to near-term revenue, then eventually the cost may simply not be possible to meet. Or for that matter, the capital to manage the increasing load may simply not exist - it does not matter how much valuable data you have, if the supply of hardware cannot keep up with your demand. Also, I suspect that most of the "data" obtained by the incessant hammering on GitHub is not very valuable. Most business code is routine, and getting Copilot to help out with generating enormous amounts of it may not contribute much in return.
petcat 5mo ago
> 90% AI generated code And it isn't even clear yet if the AI generated code is even particularly valuable since it's legally ambiguous as to whether or not any human ownership can be attributed to it. The USPTO has declined copyrightability for genai artwork, it's only a matter of time before the same question comes up about code.
- graemep 5mo ago
  Your claim is incorrect. Something purely AI generated may not be covered by copyright in the US. That would make it more valuable to MS as you can reuse it as you like. However, works with significant human input are covered by copyright, and most code does have such input. Human review, and correction is very common. There is a lot of AI generated code out there, and there are no cases challenging the copyright on it. You also need to look beyond US law. Software is a global business and most software businesses do not want to write software they can only sell in certain countries.

pydry 5mo ago

Github naturally scales horizontally. Usage numbers is the PR reason. Vibecoding insanity in Microsoft is the more plausible actual culprit.

add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
So maybe it's AI that's responsible for both ends. The increased traffic and the lessened product.
sofixa 5mo ago
> Github naturally scales horizontally Not necessarily, a few years ago they had some crucial information stuck in a single MySQL cluster (so write constrained) and were working on sharding it, but struggling: https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/partitioning-githubs-relational-databases-scale/ https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/partitioning-...

amluto 5mo ago

For literally decades, I’ve observed that there are systems that make each operation cheap and systems that work hard to scale out. The former frequently seems to wildly outperform the latter. GitHub, for example, seems to implement the main repository /pulls page as a search query, which is hinted at by the prefilled search bar and was mostly confirmed last week when the search backend failed and pull requests didn’t load. But it could have been implemented as a plain API call that just loads open pull requests, and that API exists and did not go down. If GitHub focused a bit on identifying their top 95% of high level operations (page loads including resulting API calls, for example) and making them efficient, I bet they could get a 5x or better reduction in backend load by simplifying them. (Don’t even get me started on the diff viewer. I realize that much of its awfulness is the horribly inefficient front end, which does not directly load the back end, but I expect there is plenty of room for improvement. The plain git command line features are very fast.)

the_sleaze_ 5mo ago
I think you need to broaden your focus here - I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories. Microsoft bought Github and migrated to Azure, which is explains the findings. The query performance was fine before they started serving from Azure. I mean honestly, as though there isn't one single person competent enough to read some logs and horizontally scale a few read only dbs to meet demand? That's not it
- AlexB138 5mo ago
  > I think you need to broaden your focus here - I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories. This is the opposite of my recollection, actually. I distinctly remember having conversations about Github struggling to scale well before MS was involved, and people claiming that MS had somehow saved Github because it had stabilized and begun adding features again. > The query performance was fine before they started serving from Azure. This may be correct though. The Azure migration seems more aligned with the timeline of struggling to scale.

eddyg 5mo ago

From the GitHub COO on April 3rd: Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.) GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week. So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features. https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 They also had a recent blog post about availability: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-... I don't envy the scaling issues the GitHub engineers are facing! #HugOps

wolfi1 5mo ago
I wonder how many of those actions are really necessary
- bravetraveler 5mo ago
  Or how many pushes those commits are spread across; oh, neat, big number.
- PhilipRoman 5mo ago
  And how many of those actions do uncached downloads instead of building self-contained offline images... Speaking of which, I wonder if GitHub has implemented any HTTP interception for common mirror sites, like used by apt, etc.
  - spockz 5mo ago
    Many downloads now go over https. Intercepting them would require having certificate for those domains. IIRC on the clouds the standard images do have a sources list that points to mirrors on the cloud’s network. I would only presume Github Actions runners have the same. Not sure if something similar exists for NPM which is big for all things JS.

elAhmo 5mo ago

Can you share where did they published that?

AlexB138 5mo ago
Their COO has talked about it extensively on X. A sibling comment in this thread posted a link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011075

mohsen1 5mo ago

The same company operates the Xbox network. More daily active users and more events per second

incognito124 5mo ago
Xbox network was _designed_ for such concurrency, GitHub is Ruby on rails + vitess (mysql).
steve1977 5mo ago
Do they run Xbox network on Azure or is it a separate thing?
brian-armstrong 5mo ago
Not comparable at all. Xbox would be mostly transient traffic. It's probably not much more than packet forwarding for a lot of traffic. Github is a giant complicated stateful mess with a lot of reads and writes. It also has a lot of features at this point. Hard to scale and hard to optimize.
- pathartl 5mo ago
  I think this is minimizing the Xbox platform. They are also a massive digital distribution platform where almost every game is a digital download now. That being said, you are correct. It is absolutely no surprise to me that Actions has the worst uptime.

sh3rl0ck 5mo ago

I've been a strong proponent of reallocating all LinkedIn server capacity to GitHub.

dijksterhuis 5mo ago
this is an idea that i’d happily get behind.
bachmeier 5mo ago
[flagged]

crote 5mo ago

It's a bit hard to blindly trust their numbers when they are trying very hard to sell Copilot to everyone. Sure, AI will undoubtedly have increased their workload, but how much of the shown figures is real, and how much is the PR department trying to make it look like Copilot & friends is a massive success?

amarant 5mo ago

Huh, so vibe coding really is the reason GitHub has been down so much lately!

munk-a 5mo ago

Have they published incredible usage rate numbers somewhere? I saw their recent blog post about the outages[1] and it has a graph without axis labels and without any context around usage before 2019 to indicate just how much this agentic acceleration has actually increased usage growth. 1. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

kqp 5mo ago

A week ago GitHub published a blog post saying this, a day later GitHub execs were in HN comments repeating it, and just like that it’s common knowledge that GitHub’s steady reliability decline from the 2019 onward was actually caused not by the 2019 Microsoft integration, but by something that did not exist until 2023. PR works, y’all. Turns out the reason GitHub doesn’t work is because it’s just so good!

shevy-java 5mo ago

It means that Skynet is winning. What you described above will piss off and alienate even more people. Eventually there will be a critical threshold crossed. Microslop will be the first victim of Skynet 11.0 (I lost track of its current version but you can see how much damage is caused by AI in general now - this was the beginning of skynet. Except that it sucks).

cedws 5mo ago

The disappointing thing is that if you do some digging, you'll find the majority of that it's slop and just outright spam. There's a page on GitHub where you can see recently updated repositories and it's very rare I see anything of quality on there. GitHub has become a dumping ground for broken code and it has more bots than ever. As much as I hate ID verification it might be a necessarily evil at this point because clearly their anti-bot measures aren't working.

faangguyindia 5mo ago

Youtube does not suuffer from rise in AI videos?