GitHub had a lie down yesterday, prompting an apology from CEO Nat Friedman and consternation amongst developers who rely on the Microsoft-owned code repo and even a touch of paranoia as to the possible reasons for the outage.

Yesterday’s two hour plus degradation resulted in some nasty looking dark orange bars in the vendor’s status page, with a distinct touch of rouge across Github Actions and GitHub packages.

Overall, the vendor rated yesterday as a particle outage – a code orange – though not the full blooded red of a major outage, as the vendor had last August.

However, yesterday’s problems came in the wake of a similar outage on Tuesday, while last week also saw partial outages of under an hour on Wednesday and Thursday. (A sickly mustardy green).

This was enough to prompt CEO Nat Friedman to take to Twitter to apologise for the problems the repo hoster has experienced over the last couple of weeks.

We asked GitHub if it could throw any further light on the outages, but it has yet to get back to us. Back in October 2018 a major worldwide outage prompted a lengthy mea culpa from the firm, an overhaul of its reporting system, and a pledge to invest in chaos engineering.

It may, or may not, be relevant that rival code repo/devops operator GitLab experienced a DOS last weekend.

As of today, many customers were mainly sympathetic, and though the frequency of outages had not gone unnoticed. Goodwill is not inexhaustible though.

And there’s always room for a little paranoia, as this tweet shows.