No, they can't wait a few hours. Not when you have a 60 developer team on a private GitHub enterprise account, and it's the middle of the workday.

If you have a team that large and are relying on cloud services, then you need to have a plan in place for short interruptions like this. If you really have a 60-dev team, you should have knocked out all the SPOFs in the systems that support them - 60-dev teams are millions of dollars a year in salary, even at bargain basement wages. There is not a single serious provider that will guarantee you 100% uptime, because outages, however rare, do happen.

I don't disagree with you, but it's also not that simple. Anyway - I'm simply trying to point out that it is a bit deal when a large cloud service like GitHub goes down.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a private GitHub enterprise account", but GitHub has a product called "GitHub Enterprise", which is essentially GitHub in a VM that you can install in your own data center. We have a lot fewer than 60 developers, and we have a GitHub Enterprise installation, partly out of concern about issues like this (and also maybe a little IP protection paranoia).

if all 60 are working together sure, but if it's a handful of devs working with each other, you can pull directly from each others repository.

PITB, yes. But you can still get work done.

Again, not so easy when it's a massive multi-team effort - we have a continuous integration system that builds every branch (we use a GitFlow based model) on every commit that gets pushed to GitHub.

You can pull from eachother, but since you know github will be up in a few hours and it would take more than that to really coordinate any workflow change, most of the time people just goof off until github is back.

Plus you are forgetting that lot of automated jobs get triggered on github changes. Many shops kick off all kinds of tests, deployments, and other things based on changes to the github repo.

If devs want to use that as an excuse to do other things, that's cool.

My point was simply that you can still be productive when github goes down, if you want to be.

Sure, developers can still be productive. But what about QA, UX, Product Managers? They rely on automated jobs that get triggered by GitHub changes.

I don't think you're "wrong" for the developer use case, but the reality is that it can bring large teams to a screeching halt.

I find it easy to imagine that if the task you are doing right now requires looking at open issues, it could be a blocker. I depend on an internally controlled issue tracking system, and if my current task is creating or responding to defects and requirements, I'm not going to be happy if that system is down.

One other problem is that if you're using a tool like Capistrano to deploy, you usually set your remote repo to Github. When Github goes down, you can't deploy until it comes back up or you set up your own remote server.

You'd have to hope so! I wanted to use the site, but having it down didn't bother me. But if I depended on it for my day job, I'd want more than just my source code available.