GitHub Faces 'Major Service Outage' [Update] (github.com)

Code repository GitHub is facing a major service outage, it said moments ago. Earlier today, the company said it was facing a minor service outage. The downtime comes less than two weeks after it was facing another "minor service outage," which lasted for several hours. The cause for today's disruption remains unknown. The open source company's Twitter feed suggests it has faced several issues over the past few months.

Update: GitHub reports all the services are now operational.

Comments

Excessive Dependency Syndrome

[ErichTheRed]

I've spent a 20+ year career in IT, and have noticed the trend over the last decade has been to rely almost fully on a service you don't control for a key part of operations. Most of my work has been with Azure lately, and Microsoft is shifting from releasing updates in packaged format that they publish and host to just pumping it out onto GitHub. There was a story last year about how tons of web projects were broken when a developer removed a portion of functionality from a JavaScript framework hosted publically -- and it turned out to be a trivial sting-manipulation function.

There is nothing wrong with not reinventing the wheel every time and using other peoples' resources. There is something very wrong with assuming that third parties will keep their systems running 100% of the time and never have bad days. Even Microsoft won't guarantee that Azure regions, of which most are _collections_ of fully redundant data centers, will be fully available all the time and that your applications will never experience downtime. You should never assume a resource will be published in the same place and remain online forever, nor should you rely fully on a third party service to provide your only means of providing the service you're providing.