GitHub's Reliability Crisis: Three Nines Availability Falls Short of Industry Standards

GitHub appears to be struggling with maintaining even basic three nines availability, as the platform has experienced multiple service disruptions and outages in recent months that have affected core functionality for developers worldwide.

Recent Outages Highlight Systemic Issues

The most recent incident occurred on February 9, when GitHub's Actions, pull requests, notifications, and Copilot services all experienced significant problems. The company first acknowledged issues at 1554 UTC, admitting to problems with "some GitHub services." By 1757 UTC, notification delays had improved to approximately 30 minutes, but it wasn't until 1929 UTC that GitHub confirmed services had returned to normal.

Copilot, one of GitHub's flagship AI-powered features, suffered its own separate outage spanning from 1629 UTC on February 9 to 0957 UTC on February 10. During this period, GitHub reported problems with Copilot policy propagation for some users, stating that "this may prevent newly enabled models from appearing when users try to access them."

Availability Metrics Paint Concerning Picture

GitHub's recent performance has been notably poor when measured against industry standards. Analysis of the platform's unofficial status feed reveals that uptime dropped below 90 percent at one point in 2025, falling well short of the three nines (99.9%) availability that many enterprise customers expect.

The company's Service Level Agreement for Enterprise Cloud customers specifies 99.9 percent uptime, but this guarantee does not extend to all users. This discrepancy has raised concerns among the developer community about the reliability of GitHub's infrastructure, particularly given the platform's central role in modern software development workflows.

Industry Context and Broader Implications

GitHub's struggles are not occurring in isolation. The broader cloud services industry has seen increasing instability, with many platforms struggling to maintain even basic availability targets. While five nines (99.999 percent uptime) represents the gold standard in the industry, some vendors are finding it challenging to maintain even 90 percent availability.

This trend is particularly concerning for customers who rely on these platforms for mission-critical operations. The increasing frequency and duration of outages highlight the need for organizations to plan not just for uptime, but also for potential downtime scenarios.

Impact on Development Workflows

The reliability issues have significant implications for development teams who depend on GitHub for their daily workflows. Actions, pull requests, and notifications are fundamental to modern DevOps practices, and disruptions to these services can cascade through entire development pipelines.

For teams using GitHub Copilot, the AI coding assistant has become an integral part of the development process for many programmers. Outages affecting Copilot's functionality can directly impact developer productivity and code quality.

Transparency and Communication Challenges

GitHub's recent changes to its status page have made it more difficult for users to visualize service availability over time. While the details of current incidents are prominently displayed, getting a comprehensive view of the platform's historical performance, particularly overall uptime over the last 90 days, has become more challenging.

The existence of unofficial status feeds that reconstruct this missing information underscores the community's need for better transparency and historical data about service reliability.

Looking Forward

As GitHub continues to evolve and expand its feature set, including deeper integration of AI technologies, the pressure to maintain reliable service will only increase. The platform's recent performance suggests that infrastructure stability needs to become a higher priority to meet the expectations of its enterprise customers and the broader developer community.

The situation serves as a reminder that even the most widely-used platforms can struggle with basic availability targets, and that organizations must maintain contingency plans for when these critical services experience disruptions.

The challenges faced by GitHub reflect broader issues in the cloud services industry, where the pursuit of new features and capabilities sometimes comes at the expense of fundamental reliability. As the platform continues to play a central role in software development, addressing these availability issues will be crucial for maintaining user trust and meeting the needs of its diverse customer base.