People want to dunk on GitHub, but honestly going from 50M of <thing> per day to 2B <thing> per day will break pretty much any system anyone has ever built here. Even if it was over the span of ~8 months, many things will fall over and then as you patch those the next domino will fall.
I feel bad for the team, but will be great growth opportunities for all.
> going from 50M of <thing> per day to 2B <thing> per day will break pretty much any system anyone has ever built here
This is likely a pricing failure. Systems breaking due to over-usage is like going to the store and finding that they're sold out. You're much less likely to sell out if you charge more. Meanwhile, GitHub not only didn't raise prices, they cut them at the beginning of the year: https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-f...
Bear in mind as well that the Pro tier includes 3,000 minutes/month and the Enterprise tier ($21/seat/month, and no published minimum seat floors) includes 50,000 minutes/month. $21/50,000 minutes/month for a solopreneur is practically giving away the farm.
GitHub needs to drastically increase pricing, at least for Actions; their current pricing is practically a WTO dumping violation.
It makes sense but in a post AI world - what is of value? Not the software itself, but data and network effects. MS needs to move from a world where their proprietary software makes money, to one where they enable a captive network and have data; Github provides both.
So maybe them providing service at literally all costs to themselves is a smart strategy long term.
2 billion per day is 23,148 per second on average. Perhaps peak bursts are >100K per second. That's a seriously insane number to keep up with at GitHub's scale. I've worked on systems that write >100K things per second and when it has to be globally distributed and relatively consistent within seconds, that's a very tough challenge.
There has to be some economic incentive in place if their scaling issues impact the entire platform. If their system can't handle it then they need a toll system for these agents until the scaling is in place.
They probably had a redistribution of free-tier and paid-tier usage in the last year-ish.
Just backseat gaming but a lot of those issues could probably be solved if they'd (temporarly) reduce the free tier. I'd say simply dropping Actions from it would reduce the load by a lot because then most vibe coders wouldn't bother integrating a CI/CD and either just use local pre-commit scripts or stop using those entirely. Not using a CI also drops the requirement for using PRs on solo-dev projects so they might also reduce load there.
Presumably, they still want the free tier to help acquire new customers?
You could say they should separate the human users from the slopsters in any tier. This could be done with some quota/rate limiting model.
But, if they are either on the fence or believing that agent-based development is the way forward, then that new reality is the one they would need to support. Cutting it off will send those customers elsewhere.
And, if you've managed to handle the new workload, it is basically in the noise to also handle artisanal human developers in the background on the same solution...
Yeah, only yesterday I let claude build and deploy me a end to end project that will flicker my lifx light-bulb when commits to any open source project lands. In the morning I saw it stopped around 11 pm PST yesterday. I was wondering why and I was wondering, how easy it is do a complete working project like this in minutes and what is stopping people to do 100s of such project per day. Github wasn't built for this scenario.
Free Github Actions weren't built for this scenario.
Make Github Actions a paid-tier exclusive and this problem goes away.
GitHub are too scared to do that after the backlash around charging people for their own runners, but this would be a very different thing, simply stop giving free actions to people who have never paid them a penny.
> GitHub are too scared to do that after the backlash around charging people for their own runners, but this would be a very different thing, simply stop giving free actions to people who have never paid them a penny.
I had no idea they charged you to run your own runner. I am immediately of the opinion that is wrong.
Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product. Or maybe "your actions only run when we have spare compute". I've personally given Github money (back when private repos cost $$) and wouldn't be concerned about doing it again.
They don't charge you for your own runner but they wanted to. The downtime hasn't really impacted me and not really a reason for me to leave github, but making me pay for using my own infrastructure would quickly encourage me to leave github.
> Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product.
This is a real problem for acquiring customers. CI/CD / Actions in general has a low initial perceived value and a high perceived value after use while being primarily a commodity product (serverless compute). To acquire customers they need to offer a free tier, to make money they need to charge their heavy users more, but because it is a commodity their heavy users will self-host runners or jump ship.
Action minutes is a really good proxy for value gain from cloud git services, where repo count, user count, file count/size, etc isn't.
I think a reasonable amount is fine for them to serve as the orchestrator, queue, and control plane for self hosted runners, has to be reasonable though. Think monthly utility service cost to maintain service vs usage.
worse than this is that if you fork a repo that has actions, the actions will run on your account as well - which is completely unnecessary. I have all sorts of stale forks that are just churning away with actions that I dont care about at all because I am not getting charged.
The solution, of course, is not to simply start charging for all actions, because then everyone would wake up to all sorts of mystery charges. They'd need to notify that forked actions would be turned off and then opt-in for paid actions.
Is this really the case? Because GitHub availability has been going downhill since way before models hit that critical mass of quality end of last year.
Why does everything work perfectly for a week after an outage is fixed? Usage is still 30x and even higher because everyone catches up from the downtime.
Sounds more like a bloated, vibe coded stack that has to be unclogged every 2 weeks.
I disabled CI on my part and need to make a separate "ci run" comment to start the CI. I found it increasingly annoying to have CI run "on every commit / push" because I only really need it to be green on the prod-release, not on every commit.
I have not understood, and still do not understand, why everyone locks themselves into github's CI/CD pipeline. It's not hard to set up checks that run on a generic docker setup. I have a home server that I use for all my builds and checks, with a github actions config to run manually if I can't VPN into my home network.
Besides being more reliable, it's just faster to run on a machine you control.
If you're a small/FOSS project, it's not worth the time overhead to set up and maintain and troubleshoot.
If you're a large project, companies generally get more value paying for SaaS and letting devs do dev, rather than troubleshooting Jenkins for the billionth time.
The real value self-host brings is somewhere in the middle, where you need paid-level features with 0 fiat (and can pay in time instead).
There’s a great deal to be said for having (inter alia) matrices, job dependencies, and cross-platform runners already working and available. Docker won’t immediately provide those things.
It's probably the biggest, bestest, hardestest proof of 'worse is better' anyone could think of. The system is so dumb and inconsistent and simplistic it's actually a selling point: 'everyone in my team knows yaml' is an argument I kept hearing, but this conveniently ignores the fact that a) yaml is a serialization format, not a business logic description language b) the values in the yamls are a cursed mix of shell, whatever js variant it is c) actions themselves are mixes of scripts that accept completely schemaless values, so good luck figuring things out (at least in the pre-LLM era, anyway).
It's like everyone collectively agreed that assembly is bad, yes, but building CI/CD in assembly is actually good.
I was just debating if I was going to side step actions altogether for a new build and deployment flow.
I'm at a point where I'm going to set two permanent branches on the remote, one pertaining to each environment. The targets will poll for the latest commit at their configured branch and perform a rebuild internally if a change is detected. Assuming git core ops are still alive, it is possible to keep this running. It's also easy to migrate to a different vendor.
I moved my team from GitHub Actions to RWX and I can't even express how much better it has been. It’s literally 10 times faster, qualitatively different.
GitLab CI, BuildKite, Semaphore, Concourse (development started up again, last release was two weeks ago)...
GitHub Actions is only OK for relatively simple CI needs, or if your project is open-source and you enjoy having free CI. No major professional/enterprise CI need should depend on it.
So I see an interesting side effect of all of this in your comment. The groupthink seems to conclude that the root of GH's issues are:
- A dramatic increase in its traffic due to vibecoding
- Azure just generally not being very reliable
Now, if you're not a paying customer, maybe you just ignore this and chalk it up to "I'm getting what I paid for". And if you're a paying customer, you migrate away. What happens to GH then? Well, you (and other paying customers) are probably only a small part of the first of the identified causes, and not at all a contributor to the second. So it's not like you moving away will make GH more reliable, but it does lessen MS's motivations for fixing things: GH as a business unit works by having a free tier and a premium tier and that's fine as long as the profit from the premium tier exceeds the cost of the free tier.
THat's long winded way of saying: I wonder if you/other paying customers leaving is the real start of a GH death spiral. Less paying customers == less MS investment == less paying customers == less MS investment, etc.
For us it's not just about reliability, but risk exposure. The last couple of years really changed what our security model looks like. And it's not in public clouds, on SaaS products. LLMs are killing SaaS for sure, not by replacing them but making them a concentrated risk.
Not really hard to understand code is a arbitrary commodity and anyone can grab a cloud model and push code and hook into ci, then have no idea theyre triggering rebuilds everytime they rename their todo apps title.
Basically yes, that's modern day cloud native large scale scalable software. Many smaller software components working together, and sometimes you get a perfect storm of issues or a single point of failure (like DNS) that fails.
I have a noninformed thought on this... I think a lot of these issues are actually because they're not on modern Cloud yet.
I think GitHub was rolling everything themselves when Microsoft bought them. Ever since, MS has been working to strategically shift to Azure but that's a difficult and careful process that takes time.
In the meantime, the AI boom hit and usage went through the roof, crippling aging non-scaled infrastructure that hasn't had a chance to be modernized yet.
A lot of issues might very well be "we broke something while migrating", but I think a lot are also simply capacity issues on legacy.
Anything people are building with agentic coding could be called a "house of cards."
It should not surprise people when things start collapsing when there have been little falsehoods and random bits of senseless codes written by agents all over the place.
Or rather rate limit CI or something. Free repos that don't use large scale LLM activity to trigger a humongous amount of workload onto the github servers don't have to be caught in the crossfire.
I feel bad for the team, but will be great growth opportunities for all.
This is likely a pricing failure. Systems breaking due to over-usage is like going to the store and finding that they're sold out. You're much less likely to sell out if you charge more. Meanwhile, GitHub not only didn't raise prices, they cut them at the beginning of the year: https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-f...
And this is beside them cutting the Pro tier from $7/seat/month to $4/seat/month back in 2020 and not touching the price since: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github...
Bear in mind as well that the Pro tier includes 3,000 minutes/month and the Enterprise tier ($21/seat/month, and no published minimum seat floors) includes 50,000 minutes/month. $21/50,000 minutes/month for a solopreneur is practically giving away the farm.
GitHub needs to drastically increase pricing, at least for Actions; their current pricing is practically a WTO dumping violation.
So maybe them providing service at literally all costs to themselves is a smart strategy long term.
Just backseat gaming but a lot of those issues could probably be solved if they'd (temporarly) reduce the free tier. I'd say simply dropping Actions from it would reduce the load by a lot because then most vibe coders wouldn't bother integrating a CI/CD and either just use local pre-commit scripts or stop using those entirely. Not using a CI also drops the requirement for using PRs on solo-dev projects so they might also reduce load there.
Be careful what you wish for, because we might get a toll system for humans instead.
That being said, they are definitely even less reliable now due to demand.
You could say they should separate the human users from the slopsters in any tier. This could be done with some quota/rate limiting model.
But, if they are either on the fence or believing that agent-based development is the way forward, then that new reality is the one they would need to support. Cutting it off will send those customers elsewhere.
And, if you've managed to handle the new workload, it is basically in the noise to also handle artisanal human developers in the background on the same solution...
Make Github Actions a paid-tier exclusive and this problem goes away.
GitHub are too scared to do that after the backlash around charging people for their own runners, but this would be a very different thing, simply stop giving free actions to people who have never paid them a penny.
I had no idea they charged you to run your own runner. I am immediately of the opinion that is wrong.
Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product. Or maybe "your actions only run when we have spare compute". I've personally given Github money (back when private repos cost $$) and wouldn't be concerned about doing it again.
That is to say, I think you've nailed it.
This is a real problem for acquiring customers. CI/CD / Actions in general has a low initial perceived value and a high perceived value after use while being primarily a commodity product (serverless compute). To acquire customers they need to offer a free tier, to make money they need to charge their heavy users more, but because it is a commodity their heavy users will self-host runners or jump ship.
Action minutes is a really good proxy for value gain from cloud git services, where repo count, user count, file count/size, etc isn't.
Its a fun pricing puzzle.
The solution, of course, is not to simply start charging for all actions, because then everyone would wake up to all sorts of mystery charges. They'd need to notify that forked actions would be turned off and then opt-in for paid actions.
(I know because I recently hit it)
Sounds more like a bloated, vibe coded stack that has to be unclogged every 2 weeks.
Besides being more reliable, it's just faster to run on a machine you control.
I would not underestimate how strategically important that will prove to be for Microsoft moving forward.
If you're a large project, companies generally get more value paying for SaaS and letting devs do dev, rather than troubleshooting Jenkins for the billionth time.
The real value self-host brings is somewhere in the middle, where you need paid-level features with 0 fiat (and can pay in time instead).
I have a few GitHub actions that have ran for years without issue. You add a yaml file to your repo and it’s done.
As a hobbyist, I’m happy.
I would never do any real work with actions though.
It's like everyone collectively agreed that assembly is bad, yes, but building CI/CD in assembly is actually good.
I'm at a point where I'm going to set two permanent branches on the remote, one pertaining to each environment. The targets will poll for the latest commit at their configured branch and perform a rebuild internally if a change is detected. Assuming git core ops are still alive, it is possible to keep this running. It's also easy to migrate to a different vendor.
GitHub Actions is only OK for relatively simple CI needs, or if your project is open-source and you enjoy having free CI. No major professional/enterprise CI need should depend on it.
Now, if you're not a paying customer, maybe you just ignore this and chalk it up to "I'm getting what I paid for". And if you're a paying customer, you migrate away. What happens to GH then? Well, you (and other paying customers) are probably only a small part of the first of the identified causes, and not at all a contributor to the second. So it's not like you moving away will make GH more reliable, but it does lessen MS's motivations for fixing things: GH as a business unit works by having a free tier and a premium tier and that's fine as long as the profit from the premium tier exceeds the cost of the free tier.
THat's long winded way of saying: I wonder if you/other paying customers leaving is the real start of a GH death spiral. Less paying customers == less MS investment == less paying customers == less MS investment, etc.
For us it's not just about reliability, but risk exposure. The last couple of years really changed what our security model looks like. And it's not in public clouds, on SaaS products. LLMs are killing SaaS for sure, not by replacing them but making them a concentrated risk.
It's on Microsoft Azure.
I think GitHub was rolling everything themselves when Microsoft bought them. Ever since, MS has been working to strategically shift to Azure but that's a difficult and careful process that takes time.
In the meantime, the AI boom hit and usage went through the roof, crippling aging non-scaled infrastructure that hasn't had a chance to be modernized yet.
A lot of issues might very well be "we broke something while migrating", but I think a lot are also simply capacity issues on legacy.
It should not surprise people when things start collapsing when there have been little falsehoods and random bits of senseless codes written by agents all over the place.
There are no more excuses to self host. You can now ask Claude to do it for you, given that “coding is solved”.
Or even vibe code your own GitHub at this point.
Can’t tell if the irony is intentional or not
The entire US economy is tottering due to a lack of anti-trust enforcement.
Even The Economist, an oligarch-friendly magazine, has been hitting the alarm bell on this for over a decade: "America needs a giant dose of competition" https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-...