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Episode
477
Interview
Web News

What Is Going On With GitHub?

Recorded:
April 29, 2026
Released:
May 12, 2026
Episode Number:
477

GitHub has had a rough few months, with outages, service degradations, Copilot interruptions, and even a merge queue bug that affected real pull requests. In this episode, Matt and Mike look at what’s been happening with GitHub, why developers rely on it so heavily, and whether the rise of AI-assisted coding is putting even more pressure on one of the most important platforms in modern software development. Is this just normal growing pain for critical infrastructure, or a warning sign that developers should rethink how much trust they place in a single platform?

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Show Notes

GitHub Issue Timeline

  • Mar 3, 2026: Broad GitHub degradation, with peak failures around 40% on GitHub.com and 43% on the API, affecting web, API, Actions, Git operations, and Copilot.
  • Feb 2, 2026: GitHub Actions hosted runners and Codespaces were unavailable, causing queued and timed-out jobs across CI-dependent workflows.
  • Apr 23, 2026: Merge queue bug caused incorrect squash-merge commits, affecting 2,092 pull requests and potentially reverting code unintentionally.
  • Jan 13, 2026: Copilot outage hit chat in VS Code, JetBrains, and other tools, with error rates averaging 18% and peaking at 100%.
  • Feb 9, 2026: Broad intermittent failures hit GitHub.com, HTTPS Git push/pull, Actions, Copilot, Issues, PRs, webhooks, Pages, and Codespaces.

Topics to discuss

  • What would happen if Microsoft shutdown GitHub?
  • The crazy rise in GitHub usage due to AI
  • Competitors and why people aren’t migrating en masse yet?
    • Gitlab - most complete replacement
    • Gitea - lightweight opensource self hosted
    • Bitbucket - was decent when I used it but very simple

Links