> That being said, even when looking at the split uptimes, you'd have to do a very skewed weighting to achieve a number with more than one 9.

It's definitely bad no matter how it you slice the pie.

If GH pages is not serving content, my work is not blocked. (I don't use GH pages for anything personally)

> That's how you count uptime.

It's not how I and many others calculate uptime. There is not uniformity, especially when you look at contracts.

I don't use half of the services, the answer is not straight forward

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

Nobody cares about every part of GitHub working correctly. I mean, ok, their SREs are supposed to, but tabling the question of whether that's true: if tomorrow they announced a distributed no-op service with 100% downtime, you should not have the intuition that the overall availability of the platform is now worse.

It will depend on the contract.

When I was at IBM, they didn't meet their SLOs for Watson and customers got a refund for that portion of their spend

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Search, Google Chrome, Google Ads, etc. are all clearly completely different products which have very little to do each other, they're just made by the same company called Google.

GitHub is a different situation. There's one "thing" users interact with, github.com, and it does a bunch of related things. Git operations, web hooks, the GitHub API (and thus their CLI tool), issues, pull requests, Actions; it's all part of the one product users think of as "GitHub", even if they happen to be implemented as different services which can fail separately.

EDIT: To illustrate the analogy: Google Code, Google Search and Google Drive are to Google what Microsoft GitHub, Microsoft Bing and Microsoft SharePoint are to Microsoft.

It depends, for example - I would consider Google Drive uptime as part of say Google Docs’ overall uptime because if I can’t access my stored documents or save a document I’ve been working on for the past 3 hours because Drive is down I would be very pissed and wouldn’t care if it’s Drive or Docs that is the problem underneath I still can’t use Google Docs as a service at that point.

Sorry, by 'customer' I meant to say something like a large corporate customer - you're buying the whole package, and across your org, you're likely to be a little affected by even minor outages of niche services.

But yeah, totally agree that at the individual level, the observed reliability is between 90% and 99%, and probably toward the upper end of that range.

I've been on a flight that was late leaving the gate because the coffeemaker wasn't working.

That's an awful analogy because "realistically you will be able to do all the things you want to do". If a random GitHub service goes down there's a significant chance it breaks your workflow. It's not always but it's far from zero.

One bulb in the cluster going out is like a single server at GitHub going down, not a whole service.