May 6, 2026
GitHub’s red flag era
Show HN: Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions
A joke outage tracker turns GitHub pain into a red-hot public roast
TLDR: A satire site turned GitHub’s outage history into a red-square calendar and claims the service was disrupted for 32.5 days last year. Commenters split between joking about quiet weekends and feeling bad for the team, turning a simple meme into a roast about reliability and burnout.
A cheeky Show HN project called Red Squares has taken GitHub’s familiar little contribution chart — the grid that usually shows how often people code — and flipped it into a public scoreboard of embarrassment. Instead of proud green boxes, users get red squares for the days GitHub was down, with darker shades meaning longer outages. The kicker? The site claims 32.5 days of downtime in the past year, turning a boring status-history archive into a brutally simple visual gag.
But the real show is in the comments, where sympathy, sarcasm, and straight-up workplace jokes collided. One of the loudest running bits was the suspiciously lighter weekends: are outages lower because fewer people are using GitHub, or because fewer employees are around to accidentally break things? That joke landed hard, with one commenter serving up a spicy double entendre about whether the pattern is “load based or github-employee based.” Others leaned into the chaos, deadpanning that weekends are the “untapped frontier” for future outages and joking that the lighter weekend damage was “perfect” since they weren’t planning to work anyway.
Not everyone was there just for dunks. A few commenters sounded genuinely worn out by the meme cycle, saying the jokes are starting to hurt because there’s clearly a real team struggling behind the scenes. And then came the nerdy detective energy: some now want to know whether these breakdowns line up with GitHub release schedules. So yes, it’s a satire project — but the comments turned it into a mini-drama about blame, burnout, and whether the internet’s favorite coding platform is becoming its own punchline.
Key Points
- •"Red Squares" is a satirical version of GitHub’s contribution graph that visualizes outages instead of code contributions.
- •Each red square represents a day GitHub experienced an outage.
- •Darker squares indicate longer outage duration.
- •The project reports 32.5 days of GitHub downtime over the last year.
- •The outage dataset is aggregated from mrshu/github-statuses, reconstructed from githubstatus.com, and excludes scheduled maintenance and unrated incidents.