IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

GitHub is down again

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

1. GitHub’s reliability is in crisis
Users report frequent, multi‑service outages that block PRs, Actions, and even basic web pages.

“I’ve been seeing a lot of 500 errors myself, latency seems to have spiked too.” – rozenmd
“The incident has now expanded to include webhooks, git operations, actions, general page load + API requests, issues, and pull requests.” – rileymichael

2. The Azure migration is the root cause
The shift to Microsoft’s cloud is blamed for the instability, with many incidents traced to Azure failures.

“They’re moving from legacy infra to Azure, so there’s a ton of churn happening behind the scenes.” – jsheard
“The main root cause of the incident on their actions was actually due to Azure.” – ygouzerh

3. People are already moving to or considering alternatives
Self‑hosting, GitLab, Codeberg, Forgejo, and other platforms are being adopted or evaluated to avoid GitHub’s outages.

“I’m thinking about moving all my personal stuff to Codeberg.” – jeltz
“We’re starting to have that convo in our org. This is just getting worse and worse for Github.” – dsagent
“I’ve migrated to Forgejo… it’s very welcoming.” – adamcharnock

4. AI‑driven features are blamed for the chaos
The push for Copilot, agentic workflows, and other AI tools is seen as adding complexity and load that GitHub can’t handle.

“They built GitHub for one kind of scale, and the problem is that they’ve all of a sudden found themselves with a new kind of scale.” – huntaub
“They put too much AI in it bot enough engineering rigor.” – semiinfinitely

5. Corporate ownership and trust issues
Microsoft’s acquisition, antitrust concerns, and the perception that GitHub is a “monopoly” fuel frustration and calls for more transparency.

“GitHub needs to get its shit together… they need to ditch the AI and focus on high quality engineering.” – dbingham
“It’s a Microsoft product so dominant in its category that it’s going to hold everyone back for years to come.” – arnvald
“If they don’t get their ops house in order, this will go down as an all‑time own goal in our industry.” – showerst

These five themes capture the core of the discussion: a reliability crisis tied to Azure migration, the rise of AI features, the shift toward alternatives, and the broader corporate‑trust context.

🚀 Project Ideas

GitHub Outage Mitigation Proxy

Summary

  • A lightweight proxy that mirrors GitHub events (PRs, issues, comments, commits) to a local cache and exposes a GitHub‑compatible API for CI, issue tracking, and webhooks.
  • Keeps teams productive during GitHub outages by allowing local pull requests, reviews, and CI runs to continue without interruption.
  • Core value: “No more unicorn pages when you need to merge a critical bug fix” (mholt).

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Medium‑to‑large teams heavily dependent on GitHub Actions, issue tracking, and PR reviews.
Core Feature Real‑time event mirroring, local API fallback, automated retry of failed GitHub API calls, status monitoring.
Tech Stack Go (for high‑performance HTTP proxy), PostgreSQL (event store), Redis (caching), Docker (deployment), GitHub API v3/v4, WebSocket for live updates.
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue‑ready: subscription tiers ($49/mo for 10k events, $199/mo for enterprise).

Notes

  • Users lament “500 errors, latency spikes” and “unicorn pages” when pushing critical fixes (mholt, edverma2).
  • A local fallback would let teams “continue working locally” while GitHub is down (mholt).
  • Discussion potential: how to keep PR reviews consistent across mirrors, legal implications of mirroring data.

Managed Forgejo Hosting

Summary

  • Fully managed, enterprise‑grade Forgejo (formerly Gitea) hosting with SSO, audit logs, billing, and 99.9% SLA.
  • Addresses the need for “company‑friendly managed‑host alternatives” (0xbadcafebee) and the desire to move away from GitHub without self‑hosting headaches.
  • Core value: “Managed hosting + support” for teams that want Forgejo’s simplicity but not the operational burden.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Small to mid‑size companies, open‑source orgs, teams wanting self‑hosted simplicity with managed support.
Core Feature 24/7 uptime, SSO (OAuth/OIDC), audit trails, billing & usage dashboards, automated backups, compliance reports.
Tech Stack Docker‑Compose or Kubernetes, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Forgejo OSS, Keycloak for SSO, Grafana for monitoring, Terraform for infra.
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue‑ready: tiered plans ($99/mo for 5 repos, $499/mo for 50 repos + SSO).

Notes

  • Commenters like “managed hosting + support” (0xbadcafebee) and “GitLab is an ugly overcomplicated behemoth” (arnvald) highlight the gap.
  • Potential for community discussion on feature parity with GitHub (issues, PRs, Actions) and how to migrate data.

Git‑Backed Issue Tracker

Summary

  • A lightweight tool that stores issue data as markdown files in a dedicated branch, syncs across all clones, and provides a web UI and API.
  • Solves the frustration of “issues, CI, and downloads for built binaries aren’t part of vanilla Git” (arcologies1985) and the need for offline issue management.
  • Core value: “Distributed issue tracking that works even when GitHub is down.”

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Open‑source maintainers, small teams, and anyone who wants issue tracking without a central server.
Core Feature Issue CRUD via git commits, comment threads as file diffs, web UI built on static site generator, optional webhook to external services.
Tech Stack Git, Markdown, Node.js (Express), React for UI, GitHub Actions for CI, Docker for deployment.
Difficulty Low
Monetization Hobby (open source).

Notes

  • “We need a widespread standard for doing issue tracking, reviews, and CI in the repo” (flux).
  • Discussion potential: how to handle large issue volumes, merge conflicts, and integration with existing CI pipelines.

Multi‑Provider CI Orchestrator

Summary

  • A CI orchestration layer that automatically routes jobs to the healthiest available runner across GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, and self‑hosted runners.
  • Addresses the pain of “GitHub Actions down” and the need for “fallback workflows” (twistedpair, mholt).
  • Core value: “Never lose CI time because one provider is down.”

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Teams using multiple CI providers or looking for high availability.
Core Feature Health checks, job queue sharding, dynamic runner allocation, retry logic, unified job status dashboard.
Tech Stack Go (for orchestration), Kubernetes (for self‑hosted runners), REST APIs for each CI provider, Prometheus + Grafana for metrics.
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue‑ready: $149/mo for up to 10k jobs, enterprise custom pricing.

Notes

  • “GitHub Actions goes down every day” (petetnt) and “CI runs tied specifically to GitHub” (mholt) highlight the need.
  • Potential for community debate on best practices for multi‑provider CI and cost trade‑offs.

Unified Code Host Status Dashboard

Summary

  • A real‑time aggregator that pulls status pages from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, and others, visualizes incidents, and sends alerts.
  • Solves the frustration of “status page is out of date” (albelfio) and the desire for “incident timelines” (dreadnip).
  • Core value: “Know exactly when and why your code host is down before you hit the UI.”

Details

Key Value
Target Audience DevOps teams, product managers, and anyone who relies on multiple code hosts.
Core Feature RSS/JSON polling of status APIs, incident timeline charts, Slack/Email alerts, post‑mortem aggregation.
Tech Stack Python (FastAPI), Celery for polling, PostgreSQL, React for dashboard, Docker Compose for deployment.
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby (open source) with optional paid alerting service ($29/mo).

Notes

  • “We need a timeline chart from the status history” (dreadnip) and “status page is not updated” (albelfio) show the demand.
  • Discussion potential: standardizing status page formats, integrating with incident management tools (PagerDuty, Opsgenie).

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