GitProtect’s Report Highlights Cost of Weak DevOps Pipelines

GitProtect.io (Xopero Software SA), in DevOps backup and DR, tracked and analyzed security breaches, outages, and performance degradation on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, and Azure DevOps, highlighting the scale, frequency, and impact of incidents affecting some of the platform’s 1.2 billion users worldwide.

The CISO’s Guide to DevOps Threats points out that GitLab reported a 21% annual increase in incidents, while Jira faced a sharper 44% surge in operational problems. Microsoft’s Azure DevOps endured 826 hours of downtime during the study period. Although GitHub demonstrated improvement with a 25% reduction in incident frequency, the platform still recorded around 800 hours of degraded performance that impacted development teams in some way.

GitHub faced 124 incidents, totaling around 800 hours, equivalent to over 100 working days
When GitHub stumbles, global DevOps feels it, and that impact is hard to ignore. While the platform showed improvement with a 25% reduction in incidents (down from 165 in 2023 to 124 in 2024, users still endured 800 hours of degraded service performance across varying levels of impact.

This breakdown includes:

• 26 major incidents that caused over 134 hours of disruptions (more than 3 working weeks).
• 97 cases of degraded performance totaling around 669 hours, equivalent to 80+ working days or nearly 4 months of impacted productivity.

Q3 2024 marked the peak instability period, with 42 incidents.
Jira recorded over 266 business days of degraded performance across different impact levels

Project tracking and code collaboration tools, such as Jira and Bitbucket, have become the backbone of modern DevOps; however, 2024 exposed cracks in their resilience. The CISO’s Guide to DevOps Threats reveals Jira experienced a troubling 44% Y/Y increase in reported incidents, escalating from 75 cases in 2023 to 132 in 2024. Cumulatively, these incidents resulted in 2,131 hours of downtime – equivalent to:

• Approximately 266 working days (assuming 8-hour workdays), representing 73% of the working days in a calendar year.
• 89 calendar days (24 hours each), which is roughly 24% of the entire year.
• Approximately 13 full weeks out of the 52 weeks in a year.

The trend shows no signs of improvement. Compared to 2022’s 59 incidents, 2024’s 130+ cases mark a staggering 63% increase in just 2 years.

In Q3 alone, Jira users faced over 7 hours of critical disruptions – it’s nearly a full workday. During this time, a Jira Admin could run an entire Agile sprint planning session, from backlog grooming to story point estimation and stakeholder alignment.

The challenges weren’t limited to Jira alone. Bitbucket reported 38 incidents, totaling 110+ hours of disruption of different impacts. To put this in perspective, that’s sufficient time to binge-watch both Breaking Bad (≈49 h) and Better Call Saul (≈61 h) end to end.

And when we factor in maintenance windows, the total rises to nearly 200 hours of disrupted performance – a stark reminder of how much downtime can quietly accumulate over time.

Of that total, over 70 hours were classified as critical or major disruptions – roughly the time it takes to watch the entire Game of Thrones series from start to finish.

GitLab sees a 21% rise in reported incidents
GitLab encountered a significant surge in operational challenges, marked by rising incident reports, extended service disruptions, and numerous vulnerability patches.

Year-over-year comparisons reveal a 21% increase in incidents between 2023 and 2024, 76 vs. 97 incidents.

Additionally, the platform addressed 153 vulnerabilities while accumulating 798 hours of service disruption, equivalent to 99 full working days. Notably, just 44 incidents accounted for over 585 hours of partial outages. September proved particularly demanding, with GitLab resolving 21 critical vulnerabilities during this month alone.

Azure DevOps disruptions affected nearly 28% of the standard working year
Microsoft’s Azure DevOps proved that even industry giants aren’t immune to disruptions, with a surge in incidents affecting service availability and performance.

The platform recorded 111 incidents affecting services for 826 hours.

This translates to:

• 103 standard 8-hour workdays
• Approximately 28% of a typical working year
• Sufficient time for developers to complete 8-10 full hackathon cycles

The extended outage periods underscore the growing operational challenges facing even the most established DevOps platforms.

“The source of these numbers across all platforms is rarely limited to isolated technical failures. In most cases, they result from the growing complexity of DevOps environments and the lack of comprehensive, end-to-end visibility across the entire software delivery pipeline. The widespread adoption of distributed architectures, CI/CD practices, and multi-cloud infrastructures significantly increases the challenge of detecting vulnerabilities, enforcing consistent security policies, and responding to incidents in real time,” explains Greg Bak, chief of R&D, GitProtect.io. “Without a robust backup and DR strategy, even minor incidents can escalate into critical outages, data loss, or delays in software delivery. Resilience must be embedded into every phase of DevOps – from code repositories to production runtime.

The complete CISO’s Guide to DevOps Threats in PDF version provides an in-depth analysis of emerging cybersecurity trends targeting DevOps environments, including threats such as Lumma Stealer malware, NJRat trojans, fraudulent GitHub repositories, and GitLab vulnerabilities.

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Blog: GitProtect’s Report Highlights Cost Of Weak DevOps Pipelines