GitHub and the crime against software

GitHub 与针对软件的犯罪

Introduction “If a house was on fire there could be but two parties. One in favor of putting out the fire. Another in favor of the house burning.” — Abraham Lincoln

引言 “如果房子着火了，只有两派人：一派主张灭火，另一派主张让房子烧掉。”——亚伯拉罕·林肯

As I begin this article, Github is down, again. While there have been plenty of articles talking about github’s struggles with reliability, security, and performance like this one by the verge, they are only scratching the surface. Github serves as a sort of ‘signal’ of infrastructural decay within both Github and the world of big tech software services in general. While I could point to similar decay in nearly every big tech corporate service, from AWS to Google Search, Github serves as a striking example due to being nearly synonymous with software development.

当我开始写这篇文章时，GitHub 又宕机了。虽然已经有很多文章讨论了 GitHub 在可靠性、安全性和性能方面的挣扎（比如 The Verge 的这篇报道），但它们都只是触及了皮毛。GitHub 某种程度上是 GitHub 自身以及整个大型科技软件服务领域基础设施衰退的“信号”。虽然我可以指出几乎所有大型科技公司服务中都存在类似的衰退，从 AWS 到 Google 搜索，但 GitHub 是一个极具代表性的例子，因为它几乎已成为软件开发的代名词。

I remember a conversation with a recruiter in 2022 where they simply did not believe that I was a ‘real programmer’ because I didn’t have a github account. What github is supposed to be - a high-performance, high-availability, high-capacity distributed system - is my personal professional specialty, so I can bring a little more insight into the problem than your average tech reporter. It’s not just availability: github is rife with problems.

我记得 2022 年与一位招聘人员交谈时，对方仅仅因为我没有 GitHub 账号，就不相信我是个“真正的程序员”。GitHub 本应是一个高性能、高可用、大容量的分布式系统，而这正是我的专业领域，因此我能比普通科技记者更深入地洞察这些问题。这不仅仅是可用性的问题：GitHub 充满了各种弊病。

A small sample of recent problems with github

• Github has dozens of incidents a month according to their own public communications, which means the real rate is probably in the hundreds.
• Github does not expose a public bug list or any issues page, hiding their problems deep in email chains.
• Github constantly lies to its users about its uptime and priorities.
• Even by its own metrics, it is in violation of its SLA.
• Github clearly prioritizes flashy AI features over fundamental reliability.
• The increased ‘agentic’ load on github is the direct result of their own actions and those of their parent company, Microsoft, and that makes reliability problems their own fault.
• Github often breaks on Firefox and Safari, browsers with millions of users.

GitHub 近期问题的小样本

• 根据其公开通报，GitHub 每月发生数十起事故，这意味着实际发生率可能高达数百起。
• GitHub 不提供公开的 Bug 列表或问题反馈页面，将问题深埋在邮件链中。
• GitHub 经常对其用户谎报正常运行时间和优先级。
• 即便按照其自身的衡量标准，它也违反了服务等级协议 (SLA)。
• GitHub 显然将华而不实的 AI 功能置于基础可靠性之上。
• GitHub 上日益增加的“代理（Agentic）”负载是其自身及其母公司微软行为的直接结果，这使得可靠性问题完全是他们自己的过错。
• GitHub 在 Firefox 和 Safari 这类拥有数百万用户的浏览器上经常出现故障。

Github constantly lies to its users about its uptime and priorities While github’s official status page claims something like 99.8% uptime - anyone who’s used it recently knows the real number has zero nines in it. Sites like the missing github status page do a good job of showing what it really looks like. Github is well aware they’re in hot water lately, and they’ve thrown out some press releases to try and deflect the criticism. Last month, github threw out a press release titled ‘an update on github availability’ to try and address some of this criticism.

GitHub 经常对其用户谎报正常运行时间和优先级 虽然 GitHub 的官方状态页面声称拥有约 99.8% 的正常运行时间，但任何近期使用过它的人都知道，真实的数字连一个“9”都没有。像“missing github status”这类网站很好地展示了其真实状况。GitHub 非常清楚他们最近陷入了困境，并发布了一些新闻稿试图转移批评。上个月，GitHub 发布了一篇题为《关于 GitHub 可用性的更新》的新闻稿，试图回应这些批评。

Microsoft: The main driver is a rapid change in how software is being built. Since the second half of December 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply. By nearly every measure, the direction is already clear: repository creation, pull requests…

微软：主要驱动因素是软件构建方式的快速变革。自 2025 年 12 月下半月以来，代理式开发工作流急剧加速。从几乎所有指标来看，方向已经很明确：仓库创建、拉取请求（Pull Requests）……