GitHub Down: A Collection of Hilarious Reactions
GitHub’s recent outage has sparked a flurry of humorous and insightful comments from developers and tech enthusiasts alike. Here’s a roundup of the funniest and most intriguing reactions from Hacker News:
- The Classic Status Page Dilemma
- sebmellen: “I’ve never seen an outage this big. Even the homepage doesn’t load. We’ve had recurrent issues with Actions not running, but this seems a lot bigger. The status page says all is well, though: GitHub Status. Hilarious.”
- karmakaze: “I get the angry unicorn page ‘No server is currently available to service your request. Sorry about that. Please try refreshing and contact us if the problem persists.’ with that last link going to GitHub Status showing ‘GitHub Status Oct 22, 2018 Everything operating normally.’”
- Twitter/X Status Page Fail
- kalkin: “I think this is because logged-out Twitter now shows top Tweets of all time from a user, rather than most recent Tweets. Good reason why companies shouldn’t be using Twitter/X for status updates anymore!”
- TwiztidK: “The era of Twitter/X status pages needs to come to an end given how unusable it is if you aren’t logged in.”
- Mirroring and Redundancy Humor
- weystrom: “A reminder of how centralized and dependent the whole industry has become on GH, which is ironic, considering that git itself is designed to be decentralized. Good opportunity to think about mirroring your repos somewhere else like Gitea or Gitlab.”
- nox101: “They’re already mirrored on my hard drive. That’s how git works.”
- GitHub Pages Woes
- sebmellen: “This is at least a multi-million dollar payout (if they admit to it). All GitHub Pages say ‘We’re having a really bad day. The Unicorns have taken over. We’re doing our best to get them under control and get GitHub back up and running.’”
- maximilianroos: “Even GitHub-hosted Pages are down — PRQL is also a unicorn.”
- Humor Amidst Outages
- shashankkoppar: “We are experiencing interruptions in multiple public GitHub services. We suspect the impact is due to a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back. hope it comes back soon.”
- shrimpboyho3: “When you can’t merge so you have no choice but to stroke it to the GitHub unicorn… sigh…”
- Developer Reflections
- rhabarba: “I love how the same people who try to drag me towards using Git are the only people who seem to have serious problems working on their code when a website goes down.”
- waveBidder: “Git is not the same thing as github. It’s designed to be decentralized, even if it isn’t getting used that way atm.”
The outage has certainly been a reminder of how deeply integrated GitHub is in the developer workflow and the often comedic reality of relying on a single service for critical functions. Whether it’s amusing status page issues or the impact on daily tasks, the tech community has responded with a blend of humor and practical advice.