Critical piece of tech infrastructure. Which is absolutely is.

When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!

Wow. Why would your company do that? It's easy to self-host gitlab for example.

It's probably easy to self-host Gitlab for a small team working on a limited number of projects.

It's definitely not easy to self-host Gitlab for hundreds of devs working of hundreds of projects. Especially if you use it as your CI/CD pipeline, because now you have to also manage your workers.

Why company chose to pay GitHub instead of self-hosting their Gitlab instance? For the same reason they pay Microsoft for their emails instead of self-hosting them.

Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.