GitHub says sorry and vows to do better as uptime slips and devs complain

Microsoft's code hosting shack Github has published a lengthy mea culpa about its availability and reliability woes - one that includes the words "we are sorry."

Developers using the service have faced repeated downtime, and the apology comes days after Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto declared the platform is "no longer a place for serious work", announcing plans to move his terminal emulator project, Ghostty, elsewhere.

GitHub highlighted several recent incidents in its post. On April 23th, a Merge Queue bug caused merge groups containing more than one pull request to produce incorrect commits.

"In affected cases," notes GitHub, "changes from previously merged pull requests and prior commits were inadvertently reverted by subsequent merges."

Then on April 27th, parts of the user interface dependent on search stopped showing results after GitHub's Elasticsearch cluster became "overloaded (likely due to a botnet attack)." GitHub is still working on a root cause analysis ...