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by paxys 84 days ago
Took a full 8 years for a Microsoft acquisition to go to shit, which is probably a record. Kudos to the Github team for holding out this long.
4 comments

I’m still baffled that Minecraft is doing so well, despite the whole Bedrock thing. At this point I think Microsoft just forgot that they bought Mojang.
I think they largely let mojang do its own thing, occasionally forcing them to make some dumb change that usually stays exclusive to their "bedrock edition". The mojang people capitulate since the original version and the one they actually develop for is largely untouched by microsofts decision making since the backlash for dumb decisions would lose infinitely more money than if they just let it continue to be a cash cow
They'd lose a whole lot of users if they killed Java edition, since the modded community is so large. They'd quickly find one of the Minecraft clones reaching feature parity. And there's no good reason for it - it's not like Java is a threat anymore.
Exactly. So why isn't Microsoft doing just that? Isn't that how Microsoft usually handles things? Just look at Xbox. They essentially screwed up everything they could and then some.
Its had its fair share of outages and outrageous changes that overreach the bounds as well. Its more stable than github is but its had at least 2 sessions of downtime this year that I recall and they were both quite long (day length).
They don’t enforce or even default to 2fa to change the account email. In addition, they have no process to get a human to reverse account takeovers. Just a web form that tells you to call a number that redirects you back to a web form
On the other hand, they aggressively log out legitimate users, and require the master Microsoft account password to log back in (because your kids need access to your one drive settings, etc).
If I remember correctly UK players can no longer chat at all until they verify their ID.
They've made it borderline impossible to log in, especially for children.

I just use an offline server, so I wouldn't notice if they had GitHub levels of availability.

Minecraft is a trick up their sleeve yet to be used. Manipulate and indoctrinate the youth.
Indoctrinated by cubic cows
GitHub has always been incredibly outage riddled no? This is not a MSFT thing
I don't remember that happening so much (if ever) in, say, 2016. But the frequency of noticeable incidents seemingly has been rising steadily since around 2023. The Azure migration apparently only exacerbated it.
Circa 2019, my office had a bell that we would ring whenever GitHub had an outage, and it was rung several times per week.
I remember seeing unicorn daily and "webhook delivery delayed" weekly. I think it got better, but also they got more traffic, now millions of agents read files separately over and over again.

IMO it's much better now.

I remember it going down semi-regularly in the 2013+ era, and seeing HN posts about it. Especially if you were using a package manager reliant on GitHub like Cocoapods. It seems to me it is more "impactful" on the dev community now that they have gone past just being a centralized Git server for the team, to being the thing that does deploys and all sorts of other things.
I think having a single 9 of uptime is a relatively new thing even for GH
It was not nearly as bad... I remember our company migrating to github.com, and believe it or not, it was significant performance/uptime benefit over our self-hosted instance.

(And the first thing to go was occasional 500's on github-hosted files.. the core service itself - git, PR, actions - were pretty stable until recently)

How fast was Skype?
MSFT acquired Skype in 2011, so I would say only a few months:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s...

To be fair a bunch of this is because the CEO after Nat Friedman (Thomas Dohmke) was pushed out in August 25.
And a ton of the top end ruby staff have left. Many of them ended up at shopify. There is a growing about of non ruby/rails code at github, but most of the system that people think of when they think github are ruby/rails.
Shopify is on the AI-everything train as well, we'll see how that goes.
Who was also the last CEO, right? Is this a coincidence?
Nat Friedman is a grifter who always shows up and says "I'm with these guys" when somebody or something is successful. I don't think that he was responsible for anything good.