We all know that AI is compounding the problem, but I wonder how much of it is actually AI writing extremely overly-complex (and likely inefficient) CI pipelines for vibe coders who have absolutely no idea what CI is or why they would need it. I'm sure the AI makes all sorts of great arguments to the user about why they need it and the user, none the wiser, blindly accepts it all. Why wouldn't they? It costs them absolutely nothing on an OSS repo.
I know that frontier models (Astra, Fable, Opus 5.5) at some point always end up writing a test that unnecessarily elongates CI. I've seen everything from literal sleep calls in a test unit to arbitrarily deciding a test needs to download a 100MB file to prove something works. As a engineer, I catch these, but a vibe coder has no idea there's probably hundreds of these in their code making CI take 10-20 minutes. Hell, they probably don't even click the "Actions" tab.
I wonder about this too. Whenever you ask a question to do something in GitHub Actions it comes up with an answer that kinda works, but I would've never chosen because it works around the inherent limitations of GitHub Actions.
GH Actions problems are so frequent that they are really not newsworthy anymore. Most of the time they don't even show up on the status page because they seem to be completely random (e.g. manually cancelling and restarting may resolve the issue).
At this point, I think it would be more noteworthy if they cross X days with it working without issue. "Github actions remains online after 180 days" would certainly be a headline.
With all these problems, it would be interesting to understand what incentivises GitHub to continue to offer 2000 free GHA minutes per month for private repos.
At this point, a hole in the market is open for a competitor offering a private SaaS solution. The downward trend has had a long tail, but these outages seem to have become business as usual for GitHub in 2026.
Migrating off GitHub Actions is a non-trivial engineering effort. I know we've been talking for six months about "reducing our dependence" on GHA but it hasn't become a priority yet
The annoyedAtGitHub counter is so far monotonically increasing though.
I came here to read a knock down drag out flaming fundamental indictment of the entire GitHub Actions ideology and the horse it rode in on, and all I got was this incident report.
We all know that AI is compounding the problem, but I wonder how much of it is actually AI writing extremely overly-complex (and likely inefficient) CI pipelines for vibe coders who have absolutely no idea what CI is or why they would need it. I'm sure the AI makes all sorts of great arguments to the user about why they need it and the user, none the wiser, blindly accepts it all. Why wouldn't they? It costs them absolutely nothing on an OSS repo.
I know that frontier models (Astra, Fable, Opus 5.5) at some point always end up writing a test that unnecessarily elongates CI. I've seen everything from literal sleep calls in a test unit to arbitrarily deciding a test needs to download a 100MB file to prove something works. As a engineer, I catch these, but a vibe coder has no idea there's probably hundreds of these in their code making CI take 10-20 minutes. Hell, they probably don't even click the "Actions" tab.
What a mess.
I wonder about this too. Whenever you ask a question to do something in GitHub Actions it comes up with an answer that kinda works, but I would've never chosen because it works around the inherent limitations of GitHub Actions.
Interestingly all the separate enterprise cloud instances show the same thing:
https://us.githubstatus.com/posts/details/P7VGB7I
https://au.githubstatus.com/posts/details/PO54BK8
https://eu.githubstatus.com/posts/details/PRESCZY
https://jp.githubstatus.com/posts/details/P0N7ZG5
What's the point of (supposedly) separate and isolated data residency deployments if they all have single point of failure?
The point of a data residency thingie is for data residency, not uptime. It's a fig leaf, though - America can access all data residency thingies.
Well, the point is being able to charge enterprise customers more.
GH Actions problems are so frequent that they are really not newsworthy anymore. Most of the time they don't even show up on the status page because they seem to be completely random (e.g. manually cancelling and restarting may resolve the issue).
At this point, I think it would be more noteworthy if they cross X days with it working without issue. "Github actions remains online after 180 days" would certainly be a headline.
I moved my CI to a runner on my Forgejo (using a cheap Hetzner server) and it works beautifully and reliably.
It would result in a lot less noise if we got updates for when GitHub is up!
I moved my CI runners to Bunny recently, and not only is it cheaper, but it's much faster as well.
Looking for alternatives, Bunny = BunnyShell?
My company switched to a different provider for our action runners partly for reliability reasons. Despite that, jobs still aren't being dispatched.
Nice to see that the companies pushing for AI get to feel the suffer from AI.
With all these problems, it would be interesting to understand what incentivises GitHub to continue to offer 2000 free GHA minutes per month for private repos.
GH nine sixes strikes again
At this point, a hole in the market is open for a competitor offering a private SaaS solution. The downward trend has had a long tail, but these outages seem to have become business as usual for GitHub in 2026.
There are some. I'll build one just for you if you sign a contract saying you'll actually use it.
I feel like you might be my boss
Yet, companies are still choosing Github, so I don't know if all these outages have an impact. https://bloomberry.com/data/github/
Migrating off GitHub Actions is a non-trivial engineering effort. I know we've been talking for six months about "reducing our dependence" on GHA but it hasn't become a priority yet
The annoyedAtGitHub counter is so far monotonically increasing though.
So...Gitlab?
Gitea?
I came here to read a knock down drag out flaming fundamental indictment of the entire GitHub Actions ideology and the horse it rode in on, and all I got was this incident report.
Similar to what you're looking for, now that GitHub is fully on Azure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
> horse
I think you mean unicorn
Be the change you want to see in the world!
Gotta wait an hour for everyone to pile on.
And water is wet
Color me shocked