back to article GitHub falls offline, devs worldwide declare today a snow day

Popular and widely used source-code hosting service GitHub is, for the moment, no longer a widely used source-code hosting service. It has fallen offline. Since 1632 PT (0032 UTC, 1132 AEDT), the website has been down. Right now, the San Francisco-headquartered upstart reports: "We're investigating a significant network …

  1. sabroni Silver badge

    re: when GH goes down its like a free holiday

    Hardly, the whole point of using GIT is that you have a full repository locally. And you can post updates to each other without using github if you have to get someone else's code. At least that's how it was sold to me....

    1. dotdavid

      Re: re: when GH goes down its like a free holiday

      Shhhh! Our manager doesn't understand that!

    2. PassiveSmoking

      Re: re: when GH goes down its like a free holiday

      But my code's compiling!

      https://xkcd.com/303/

    3. Peter Mount

      Re: re: when GH goes down its like a free holiday

      Exactly, so unless you were trying to push to the central/public repo it shouldn't stop you at all.

      All this did for me was just that - push it to the public repo. It wasn't until about 3am UK time (insomnia before any one asks) before I was able to do that.

  2. DropBear

    Hmmmm...

    "That pretty much locks out a big wedge of open-source project developers from their Git-controlled source code"

    a) It does seem quite online for me right now and b) we all do know that every cloned git repo is a complete local copy of all the files involved, on which you're welcome to code / compile / commit as long as you don't need to actually share your changes, right?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hmmmm...

      ... or use the issue-tracking system or any of the other added-value paraphernalia GH surrounds git with

  3. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Meh

    Interesting

    Our project is mirrored on github because of all the issues we've had with sourceforge. Besides, as the previous poster said, an outage doesn't stop you working, it just makes it a bit slower if you want to copy across to other members of the team.

  4. crediblywitless

    Either it was a big deal, or it wasn't. Thanks for clearing that up.

  5. rveeblefetzer

    aww

    I miss AOKP. Good times.

  6. MiniVan
    Mushroom

    It's nuke proof

    Github goes offline and developers suddenly discover what 'git remote add' does. Well they asked a mate who knows git ;)

    git is a distributed source control system and things like github, though helpful really aren't needed for work to continue (who uses an issue list that isn't yellow notes on the wall). I suspect more repos pushing backups to bitbucket.org aka git remote add backup git@bitbucket.org : mycompany/crown-jewels.git

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ermm...

    If only three was some kind of distributed version control system that would allow developers to continue to work just as effectively whilst the centralised github servers were down.

    Oh, hang on ...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ermm...

      Are you trying to cloud the issue?

  8. Fred M

    How did the distributed bit actually work

    Never had this problem with Source Safe. Just sayin'.

    Jokes aside - did people find that the distributed bit actually worked as they thought it would? Or did they wait for GitHub to come back up just in case?

    1. Thecowking

      Re: How did the distributed bit actually work

      My main issue with git in general is remembering to push my commits and that's on my personal repos on my NAS.

      So I suspect many people barely noticed and perhaps (like me) just expected their cron jobs to push their branches when they were available.

      Merges would have been much more problematic.

    2. Adam Connelly

      Re: How did the distributed bit actually work

      With git, virtually everything that you do on it is completely offline and distributed, so most of what people do in git on a day to day basis isn't actually affected by whether github is online or not. Github is basically just a convenient place to store a definitive copy of the repository, and provides nice dev tools like pull requests. But as far as creating branches, writing code, and committing it goes - you do that totally independently of github. My point here is just that working locally is the normal state of affairs in git, rather than something that you would do in some kind of emergency situation.

      Speaking from my experience, the sorts of things that are more likely to be affected by this are things like automated builds, deploying changes and code reviews (via github pull requests). But these issues aren't anything specific to git or github, since you'd have the same issue if any centralized repository went down, and you could easily sort it in an emergency by updating your build server or other tools to point at a copy of the repository (which every dev has on their machines by virtue of the way git works).

  9. bitdivine

    The Github downtime was due to work in which they are preparing to move all the repositories to the Interplanetary File System. https://ipfs.io/

  10. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    The cool thing about working on OSS is when GH goes down its like a free holiday How do those suits feel now :P

    Way to miss the point of Git...

  11. Rainer

    we have a local gitlab

    so we don't have to deal with crap like that.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon