Show HN: Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions

(red-squares.cian.lol)

197 points | by cianmm 1 hour ago

23 comments

  • keyle 9 minutes ago
    This is one of the most creative idea I've seen this year. Tasteful and clever. Bravo!
  • debarshri 1 minute ago
    Would be funny if you host it on github pages.
  • sd9 55 minutes ago
    Weekends are the untapped frontier. Still room to scale.
    • skor 21 minutes ago
      change is the biggest cause then?
  • figmert 57 minutes ago
    Far fewer outages during the weekends. Perfect, wasn't gonna do any work then anyway.
  • jve 26 minutes ago
    A graph I have to question is even accurate.

    > Across 170 days with at least one incident · worst day Thu, Nov 20, 2025 (1.1 days)

    1.1 days total how is that possible? Scrolling over that day doesn't indicate the math behind the scenes - 1.3 hours single bullet point.

    Also Nov 19 has a bullet point 1.3 day outage but total is 8.1 hours

  • Gigacore 3 minutes ago
    It is funny how weekends are almost always up!
  • revolution88 7 minutes ago
    For 30th of April, 2026 it shows it was down 1.0 days of 2.6 days (minor incident) :)
  • elAhmo 33 minutes ago
    Funny to see this closely match contribution graphs with effectively no downtime on weekends.
  • lnenad 1 hour ago
    The memes are really painful now. I feel for the team that's is trying to survive underwater.
    • renegade-otter 24 minutes ago
      With management screaming down their necks:

      YOU NEED TO USE MOAR AI!

  • danfritz 52 minutes ago
    I wonder how well this corolates with azure incidents. Especially for the US regions.
  • WesSouza 2 minutes ago
    Well done.
  • jpb0104 22 minutes ago
    Setup my self-hosted Forgejo last night. Very pleased so far.
    • hosteur 15 minutes ago
      Yeah me too. I moved all my public projects to codeberg and my internal repos to self-hosted forgejo.

      Hosting forgejo is really easy as well. It being a single binary makes it really easy to handle with almost zero maintenance.

  • bharxhav 1 hour ago
    Would be interesting to see if this correlated with their release cycles.
    • hosteur 55 minutes ago
      Well, outages seem to be distributed across all days except weekends. So this seems like people fucking around with stuff being a major factor.
      • samlinnfer 45 minutes ago
        Surely it just means more people working, resulting in more load, resulting in more outages?
        • pwagland 29 minutes ago
          Or even both. In any kind of continuous deployment, you'd expect outages at the point of deployment, or shortly thereafter as the unintended consequences ripple.

          Then the load during the working days makes those ripples larger and into outages.

      • embedding-shape 30 minutes ago
        Most outages are caused by changes by humans ("actors"?), very rarely are things "People just dig our stuff so much we can't keep up" but more often "We didn't think about this performance drawback when we built thing X, now it's hurting us", and of course, more outages when you try to fix those issues without fully considering the scope and impact.
  • pards 42 minutes ago
    This design is perfect irony. I love it.
  • korrectional 35 minutes ago
    I don't really understand why this is happening at this scale, it's not like they just became broke and can't afford a proper server... can someone explain?
    • fareesh 24 minutes ago
      Agents are shipping code faster all over the world and in some cases 24 hours a day. Additionally, some significant number of non-developers are now developers i.e. they are also shipping to github regularly.

      This is not limited to just pushing code but all the bells and whistles that github added as features under the assumption of some predictable growth are now exceeding the original plans.

      I suspect a lot of their existing systems have to be re-architected for unanticipated scale, and it won't happen overnight for sure.

      • prepend 21 minutes ago
        They were sucking 5 years ago before agents existed. I don’t think this has anything to do with recent changes.

        https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

        • Octoth0rpe 5 minutes ago
          Pretty damning. Would also be interesting to see the number of commits overlayed. The graph tells a great story about the correlation with MS's takeover, but I wonder if at the same time that uptime went to shit, MS was shifting over large numbers of enterprise contracts to github. That would be a more complete story IMO.

          None of which excuses this. Can you imagine someone's reaction in 2017 if you told them that github would be below 90% uptime in 2026? It would be unimaginable.

        • p-e-w 13 minutes ago
          Whoa, if that is even remotely accurate then the talk about agents is a complete red herring.
          • theolivenbaum 3 minutes ago
            If I remember correctly the status page was not precise before the acquisition - so take with a big grain of salt the 100% pre-acquisition values
      • potatoman22 19 minutes ago
        [flagged]
    • prepend 23 minutes ago
      I suspect it’s caused because Microsoft is using buggy Microsoft tech instead of the original stack.

      They’re making political decisions based on what they sell vs what’s actually useful for their use case.

      It’s kind of impossible to find out if this is true though.

    • baq 24 minutes ago
      They’re on track to 30x volume yoy by their own words
    • plufz 33 minutes ago
      See previous days articles. Agentic coding. Going from 1b annual commits to estimated 14b or more from one year to another.
    • embedding-shape 32 minutes ago
      The faster you move, the more you screw up, almost no company producing software have figured out how to move fast and not screw up. It's so hard, that companies even used to boast about how much they didn't care about screwing up, as long as they moved fast.

      Add in new "productivity" tools that help you move even faster, with even less regards for how much you screw up (even though the tool could be used for you to move at the same speed, but with less screw ups), and an engineering culture which boils down to "Why not?", and you get platforms run by Microsoft that are unable to achieve two nines of reliability.

    • dicksent 27 minutes ago
      ai
  • faangguyindia 23 minutes ago
    All these companies brag about being hyperscalers and cannot scale github.

    Similarly, i see google releasing advancement after advancement in LLM yet i see antigravity sub where people are crying all time.

  • airstrike 38 minutes ago
    can you correlate this to data on # of commits, actions, etc?
  • cyanydeez 1 hour ago
    double entendre: Is it load based or github-employee based that weekends are sparser.

    or just a multifactor of both.

    • globular-toast 1 hour ago
      Didn't they blame "AI" for the increased load? I'm not sure why AI usage would be more during the week than the weekend, but it could be.

      It does look like Friday outages were a bit rarer, which could be due to having a "no deployments on Friday" rule.

      • mirekrusin 38 minutes ago
        From the chart it seems they should have policy to deploy on weekends only.
    • Shoetp 1 hour ago
      Yes
  • ramon156 41 minutes ago
    Please tell me this makes sense

    This website has no overused ai-generated animations and... I quite enjoy it. The original website[1] has a fade-in animation, big round cards, shadows, all the jazz you can think of, it's there.

    This site is very readable, very honest and sober. I don't need to sift through buzzwords to figure out tiny details.

    Thank you, OP!

    1: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

  • rvz 26 minutes ago
    Another reminder that a self hosted git repository would have more uptime than GitHub and centralizing everything to GitHub was a very bad idea. [0]

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

  • philprx 51 minutes ago
    "Good job, Microsoft, amazing uptime."
  • aykutseker 50 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • Fokamul 45 minutes ago
    Clearly their team needs more LLM usage.