The graph in TFA shows the downtime pattern starting in January 2020. OpenAI released GPT-3.5 in November 2022 (basically December), and LLM/agentic coding didn’t really kick off in the way you’re describing until 2024, but really in 2025.

How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?

The subjective experience I and others report is that GitHub feels to have gotten significantly worse over the last few months. If you look at the month over month view of "Uptime history" in the cited link[1], it confirms this: it's been sub-90 (even sub-80 last month) essentially since the start of this year (i.e. when GitHub says that commit activity 10xed). Go back even a year and it's all in the high 9s.

I honestly can't explain the discrepancy between the graph in the article and the month over month stats on the same page, but the latter tracks both to my own subjective experience of GitHub and their own internal metrics.

[1]: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

The graph is not accurate, because GitHub's historical downtime data is not accurate.

For example, here is a Hacker News story about GitHub being down on July 28th 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12178449

Here's GitHub's historical uptime graph (on which this chart is based), saying there was no recorded downtime that day, or in fact that entire month: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=40

I think it's just a case of brain drain, followed by reckless AI adoption which both drove the quality down.