It's 500 Friday at GitHub as source shack takes an hour-long morning totter

A week of wobbles ends in a good, old fashioned TITSUP*

Code shack GitHub has rounded out the week with "elevated error rates" as developers learned that Friday is a day for bacon sandwiches rather than pull requests.

Things kicked off at around 08:30 UTC, and the source shed admitted by 08:52 UTC that something was indeed amiss. The outpouring of developer grief and snark on social media was also a hint that all was not well at Microsoft's repo-happy tentacle.

Who just did this to #github 😜 pic.twitter.com/JE3oVwt8U0

— Matthew Chirgwin (@Chirgwin7) June 19, 2020

The error code 500s persisted even as GitHub assured users it was working on recovering the service; Issues, Pull Requests and Projects were affected (all of which are kind of core functions) while the rest of the platform appeared upright.

Around an hour after the wobbling began, GitHub assured worried developers that all was well. We've asked the company what happened and will update should an explanation be forthcoming.

Far be it from us to wonder if a reboot had been needed after the week's renaming decision, but since the outfit is now snuggled under the Microsoft umbrella, perhaps it has also been bashed by the update stick? Certainly, we're no stranger to Windows taking an unplanned breather for an inexplicably long time after a reboot.

It has been a difficult week for GitHub in terms of stability. Notifications had a bit of a moment on 17 June and webhooks and Actions took a tumble on 15 June. However, today's almost hour-long totter should be a salutary reminder to developers running on the platform.

This went down again! #github pic.twitter.com/aAINjPreiz

— Swastik Yadav (@codeSwastik) June 19, 2020

The unwritten rule of DevOps (alongside "Never demo using conference Wi-Fi"): maybe don't deploy on a Friday, OK? ®

* Troubling Issues Try Software Users' Patience