Copy/paste of a comment I posted a couple months ago:
I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
That's fine, but rate limiting is a solved problem at this point. They need to rate-limit free accounts and be realistic about their limits instead of letting the system fail.
Free (and non-free) accounts are already rate limited. The likely problem is that individual accounts/repos rarely hit those limits, instead the explosive demand is due to a massive growth in the number of small, individual projects being creatd.
And most of that growth is just garbage. I'm not even anti-AI, but just look at the quality of projects on GitHub these days. The site is full of spam, it's not a place for professionals anymore.
Their infrastructure is buckling under increased demand from AI generated code.
Imagine the software development lifecycle is a river blocked by several dams- necessary processes that also slow the water’s volume and speed. Writing the code was a very big dam upstream, and successive dams didn’t need to handle a lot of water. With that dam busted wide open, the torrent of code is inundating downstream processes. GitHub happens to host many of them.
Earlier this year the GitHub COO shared a post on Twitter with explosive numbers they were facing. I cannot seem to find it at the moment. (Edit: shared in other replies to this thread.)
I mean, that’s what they say but it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Which other major service struggles so much with basic scaling? They’re not serving streaming video, they’re not a real-time system. Any problems scaling should have been fixed years ago. Especially with all of Microsoft’s resources behind them.
I would argue they are. You can't cache a git repository and send people what it looked like a minute ago, because someone might have pushed 2 seconds ago.
I think the most charitable theory is that they're seeing rapidly growing usage (more users churning out higher volumes of code, via LLMs), and are struggling to scale to meet demand.
Alternative theories include "azure sucks" and "they're vibecoding everything now".
Github's, COO Kyle Daigle, claimed that the number of commits has increased 14x since last year. So shear scale has something to do with it. I don't know of too much software already operating a planetary scale that could easily absorb a 14x bump in a year.
seriously. if you are ready to scale, you are ready for that much. if that kills you, you had architecture issues that a company as big and established as GH shouldn't have.
Microsoft simply can not make software anymore. I worked at S&P Global and when you work at a global-mega corp, you quickly see why they lose the ability to create anything and just acquire companies to grow.
