Two years ago, on June 4th of 2018, Microsoft announced its acquisition of GitHub, unicorn darling of the developer tools startup ecosystem, for $7.5B in stock. The announcement unearthed a wide range of opinions and pontifications, ranging from “GitHub is doomed” to “Microsoft is smart”, with many predictions about GitHub’s future. Some thought Microsoft’s growing investments in its cloud offering, Azure, might help GitHub. Could an investment by Microsoft improve GitHub’s reliability or harden them against outages like DDOSes? Have any of these predictions come true?
We set out to analyze one angle of the GitHub acquisition: Has GitHub become more reliable since its acquisition by Microsoft? Our service, StatusGator, monitors more than 700 status pages of cloud providers and SaaS companies large and small. We aggregate and normalize status page data and make it available to our subscribers however they need: in notifications by email, Slack, Teams, or webhook, and in a unified status dashboard for all service dependencies.
GitHub Incidents Before and After Acquisition
Summary
Here's a summary of our findings, which are detailed in our blog post:
- Incident Counts increased from 89 to 126, a 41% increase.
- Minutes of Downtime increase from 6,110 to 12,074, a 97% increase.
Has GitHub really been down more? Or are they just dedicated to increase transparency now that they are owned by Fortune 50 company? What's your experience with GitHub downtime been like recently?
Top comments (1)
It's possible that an increase in traffic is causing more down time. GitHub teams is now free which has certainly brought more people to the site and/or increased how much people use their current account. GitHub has also been adding a lot of new features. Actions, I believe, is out of beta and available to the pubic. Discussions and Codespaces are in beta. All that could also attribute to the outages.
I'd be interested to see if and how much of GitHub has moved to Azure, if any.
I know your question was simply "Is GitHub down more?" but I think an increase in downtime due to an increase in traffic and features is different than simply, GitHub is down more now that MS took over.
Not defending MS in anyway, just adding to the discussion.