It's certainly not the right platform. It'd be one thing if they had any official communication on the matter anywhere else. Maybe they're ashamed and are trying to limit the visibility while only technically issuing an announcement.
They announced this exclusively on X.com, which ranks barely above Pinterest in terms of usage. That's below Reddit, Snapchat, WeChat, and Instagram, and requires a user account to view profiles and posts. And that's ignoring all the reasons X is a divisive platform with an extreme political bent.
GitHub chose not to announce this on any other social media either (BlueSky, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, or Mastodon, as of this posting, and with no emails sent on the matter.)
Maybe, but I don't use it and nobody I know uses it. It's a very politically divisive platform, and users without an account can't post on there.
There are plenty of reasons not to use X, but that's not what's in contention. X.com was the _only_ platform they shared this information on.
It bears repeating: Github decided not to use email, which every GitHub customer has, and Github chose not to use their sites, and GitHub chose not to use their otherwise active BlueSky.
It's been pretty common in the past for tech companies to announce outages and quick updates about them on twitter for decades. I'm sure their status page etc will be updated soon, but it's historically been the fastest way to get things out to the wider audience whilst bypassing the "official mail out" review by marketing etc.
I think that was a lot more justifiable when Twitter reliably let logged out users read tweets. X seem to tweak it all the time, or maybe it’s just broken a lot, but sometimes I can’t even load a tweet in a browser that isn’t logged in.
It doesn't show live profile pages to logged out users since a while ago. You get cached summary pages, an age gate error, or sometimes a straight up 404.
Most individual permalinks (.com/username/1234...) don't work without logging in, either, and the official client now uses `/i/` in place of usernames for permalinks(bogus usernames always worked; pkey was the timestamp).
This means an organizationally shared Twitter account for announcements is not a viable concept, at least until Twitter is to be transferred again to whoever would be a better keeper of it.
Even if it's a wingnut dense place, there's good arguments for using a channel independent of your infra in a case like this. You (or Github themselves) don't know if their status page is pwned.
I don't mind them using it as a channel per se (although the userbase isn't what it once was) but it certainly shouldn't be the only channel.
For example: Twitter/X, along with Nitter mirrors like XCancel, are all blocked at the client I'm currently working with so although they can see this discussion, they're excluded from some of the most important details.
(Like many former twitter users, I don't have an X account these days so I'm guessing wouldn't be able to see the full original thread - glad of XCancel, that's for sure.)
So? Is this where your corporate paying clients should find out about an issue of this severity?
Not to mention Twitter is not an open platform anymore! (A) I'm an employee in an organization paying for Github. (B) I don't have a Twitter account. I already have a Github account because of (A). Why should (B) stop/delay me from getting official comms about this?
> I can't imagine they'd spam every account with an email address
It's not "spam" if it is relevant to me, such as security incident disclosures.
Also, as tiffanyh pointed out, what's wrong with Github blog or is that exclusively for marketing fluff now? That would've been appropriate enough, without having to spend Sendgrid credits.
They should send messages directly to their customers as a first step in addition to posting an official article on their site. That’s the minimum. If they haven’t done that then it is hard to defend.
Beyond that, Twitter is the de facto default dissemination vehicle, due to its reach. Even if people are not on Twitter, they are likely to see things from people that are on Twitter.
Probably the best option after sending a mass email when customers need to take action.
The status page is for reliability issues impacting end users & the blog is for in-depth analysis.
I mean if you are going to use AI which was trained on code of statistically mediocre average at the best, have outages and major incidents every few days, why not go wild and start publishing incidents to twitter too? It checks out with the rest of the stuff.
They announced this exclusively on X.com, which ranks barely above Pinterest in terms of usage. That's below Reddit, Snapchat, WeChat, and Instagram, and requires a user account to view profiles and posts. And that's ignoring all the reasons X is a divisive platform with an extreme political bent.
GitHub chose not to announce this on any other social media either (BlueSky, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, or Mastodon, as of this posting, and with no emails sent on the matter.)