Executive TL;DR

• GitHub Actions experienced a significant outage today.
• Developers are expressing frustration and seeking alternative solutions.
• The outage highlights the need for contingency plans in case of long-duration disruptions.

The Buzz Score

The Internet’s Verdict: 80% Frustrated, 20% Indifferent

Developer Reactions

Developers are taking to forums to express their concerns and frustrations with the GitHub Actions outage.

My action failed with “Unexpected error fetching GitHub release for tag refs/heads/master: HttpError: Sorry. Your account was suspended” Which certainly made me shit myself, briefly.

Some developers are turning to manual CI/CD solutions or exploring alternative platforms.

Insane, we have to come up with contingency plans now for long-duration GitHub outages because we can’t safely do deployments. For a service we’re paying thousands of $ per year for even though we host runners ourselves…

GitHub’s Role in Development

GitHub has become a critical infrastructure for many development teams, but some are questioning what unique value it provides.

What problem is github solving that has led it to become critical infrastructure for so many? Is it that everyone is remote and VPNs are too much of a hassle to give everyone access to a build server? Is the serving as the authoritative auth for development services? Does it provide better compliance reporting? It just isn’t apparent to me what github offers that you can’t get elsewhere with at the same cost and effort.

Focus Keyword: GitHub Actions