GitHub's 90-Day Uptime: 88%. No, That's Not a Typo.

GitHub went down hard on April 23, knocking out Copilot, Webhooks, and Actions simultaneously. The incident started around 16:12 UTC with degraded availability for Copilot and Webhooks, then spread to Actions by 16:34 UTC. GitHub identified the root cause by 16:52 UTC and had most services back up within the hour, marking the incident resolved at 17:30 UTC. They promised a detailed root cause analysis would follow.

What matters is the bigger picture. Marek Šuppa's third-party status mirror shows GitHub's platform-wide uptime over the past 90 days sitting at 88.15%. That's not a typo. The best individual component managed only 99.78%, which doesn't even hit the three-nines (99.9%) standard most enterprises expect. When your AI coding assistant, CI/CD pipelines, and webhook integrations all go dark at once, the compounding impact on development teams is brutal.

Hacker News commenters didn't hold back. One developer mentioned finishing a migration to self-hosted Forgejo with CI/CD runners literally the day before the outage and feeling pretty good about that timing. Another joked it'd be more efficient to get alerts when GitHub is actually online. For teams paying $21 per user per month for GitHub Enterprise, plus $19 per user per month for Copilot Business, plus Actions compute charges, getting roughly 11% platform downtime is a tough pill. A 100-person engineering team could burn through hundreds of thousands in lost productivity over a quarter at this reliability level.

GitHub hasn't shared the root cause analysis yet. Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitHub in 2018 betting on its central role in developer workflows. But reliability numbers like these give competitors like GitLab and Bitbucket real ammunition. They'll keep pushing teams toward self-hosted AI agents until GitHub demonstrates consistent reliability.