Last week, GitHub project maintainers who feel that they’re being ignored signed a letter to the company to air their grievances. Adding even more pressure on the open-source project repository, GitHub went completely offline for about two hours yesterday evening.

Around 4:32 p.m. PST, the company posted an update on their status page notifying users that they were “investigating a significant network disruption affecting all github.com services.” Users were greeted by GitHub’s… unique… error page. At 6:29 p.m., GitHub tweeted that the site was recovering and users were able to view pages normally once again. Frustrated users took to Twitter for the inevitable onslaught of jokes that comes with a service outage.

1. looks up decentralized git workflow tools to use while github is down
2. finds https://t.co/vQS2MK3Tau
3. oh wait

— yan (@bcrypt) January 28, 2016

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

— jessie frazelle (@frazelledazzell) January 28, 2016

Although GitHub doesn’t go down often, they experienced extensive outages last year as their security team battled a series of DDoS attacks in March, and then again in late August.

A Rough Week At GitHub

GitHub’s had a tough week. Although I don’t maintain any projects on The Hub, I can sympathize with those who do. I can imagine how immensely frustrating it must be to not have open communication. This isn’t limited to developers, either– consider any job you’ve had where there was a lack of communication between management and you or your department. It makes doing your job incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

For the sake of the site and all of the open source projects hosted there, let’s hope that GitHub listens to suggestions and takes them seriously. Developers may very well pull their projects hosted there if they can’t come to some semblance of a resolution.