It is interesting, how much money is being lost during this outage?
My significant other was just let go from their job as a scapegoat for an organizational error: 3 layers of failure - IC, manager, director, and the IC was let go. The error caused a 7 figure loss for the company that has 10 figures of revenue per year. The manager and director may not see any consequences, though the director will probably be forced out by end-of-year due to incompetence. The new executive has taken to firing employees much more eagerly than their predecessor, like some sort of Jack Welch acolyte.
Their firing has put a lot of things into perspective for me. Mostly, fuck "at-will" employment and its negative effect on the American social contract.
But also this "angry ranting" online that the original poster was referencing. Not everyone has the privilege to calmly respond to things that directly impact their livelihood.
Any engineered system where an individual can accidentally cause a 7 figure outage is poorly designed. And engineering leadership that decider to terminate an individual due to such failure (as long as there was no malicious actions) is completely clueless.
I'll keep you guys in mind if the lawsuit is successful and we're allowed to publicly speak about it. I believe it's a pretty compelling (and sympathetic) story that deserves to be told. But it's still far too soon for me to be shouting the name from the rooftops.
My SO was fired - this isn't a Google review where we were treated poorly at a restaurant.
I'd be curious what the statistics might actually be for people who are directly affected because their business is suffering vs. people affected because their employer's business is suffering.
most people's employers arent firing people over a few hours of github outage.
not to mention that any business which could potentially lose enough money that they would need to let go of developers from a github outage should probably already have some business continuity plans in place.
If its so critical why relying on it, and not having ie some mirror or some other way to handle any sort of outage like this. its not like Microsoft is your friend or good business partner, ever.
With every single of these enterprise 'cloud' offerings you are giving (almost) complete power over your business/project to somebody else who couldn't care less about your success or failure, you are simply irrelevant for them. I see it at work too, every time critical external systems go down whole bank stops still, just because few bucks were saved yearly on some on-prem servers.
Look at it this way, you are learning some important lesson today and finding great area of improvement for resiliency from now on.
Boomer opinion but trusting third parties to be critical infrastructure, especially with no SLA in sight, will always end in tears. "The cloud" is very convenient, but its providers will never care about your infrastructure or your customers as much as you will.
3P-maintained infrastructure is what makes civilizations work efficiently. We're not all digging our own wells, generating our own electricity, and burning or burying our own garbage.
Agreed. So is the issue really then that people were inadequately prepared with backup plans and now they're suffering the consequences?
It's not all that different from, say, an AWS region having a service impact. People would rather complain about AWS than prepare and utilize a well-tested recovery plan to shift to a standby region. Oftentimes there's no fallback plan because the business already considered it and decided it was too costly relative to the benefit, but when the incident happens, they still can't help but complain. Humans being humans.
Eeh, you always rely on someone else's infrastructure. Even if you are off cloud entirely and own your own datacenter, you still need peering/transit. You still need power (or at least fuel). You can't avoid depending on a DNS infrastructure.
People are already saying things like "We need a plan B in case we urgently need to deploy a fix to production, and GitHub Actions is unavailable again".
But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house.
Boomer here as well, but I'd add that trusting your own org for critical infra usually also ends in tears. Most everything in IT involves failure, including in well designed systems designed by great engineers.
I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.
+1 (as a millenial) ... especially given that setting up a git server for non-OSS company code isn't too much of a challenge really. also, no need to self-denigrate this reasonable opinion in preemptive obedience.
GitHub is way more than just a git repo host. It manages code reviews, merge (pull) requests, and has an entire CI/CD workflow engine in it. Replicating all that is a challenge that most orgs are not up to.
Agree. But also, it's affecting everyone equally, whether they have a free personal account or are part of an enterprise account with SLA. Understanding the practical value of an SLA is an interesting problem.
However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...
How did this become a boomer opinion? It is proved truth thousand times a day. Not that you shouldn't use third parties - but in this industry you can shrink this exposure to the minimum, and have plan B for anything else.
A lot of casual tech folks I know don't understand GitHub's role in CI/CD, and think it's "just" revision control storage. It's natural, since many people have no reason to know about systems like ghcr.io and npm registry if they're storing vibe-coded personal projects.
GitHub Enterprise Cloud has been chugging along with no issues. I hope your critical infrastructure isn't dependent on a free tier / service. And that you have a business continuity process in place.
"It's just money. It's made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat". Jeremy Irons in movie Margin Call
If you pay developers x money / day and one of their core tools is down for n hours during the day and they spend their money on HN instead that's pretty straight forward to calculate.
“lol just use a workaround” doesn’t work in an environment with hundreds or thousands of employees coupled with audit, security, and other legal requirements to ship software.
If you're actually bleeding money, you better believe you'll get permissions for a workaround, if you know what you're doing.
It all ties back to the OP, where the issue you've might not be as bad as you think. I have been in situations where we have dropped all procedures to push a hot fix because we were actively bleeding money, and in situations where you know there is an issue, and you let it be.
What an odd hill to die on. Maybe I just lost a $30M client because they wanted an issue fixed now. Maybe my company would get sued for violating their contractual obligations if someone went cowboy to bypass procedures.
Maybe I pay for a service and I want that service to work consistently during core business hours.
