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Comments (428)

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  mitchellh
  I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say).Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know.We've been discussing it off and on for months, really started seriously discussing it a couple weeks ago, and made the final decision a few days ago. Putting metaphorical pen to paper and hitting "publish" makes it so very real.I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
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  tedivm
  It really has been remarkable watching GitHub just crumble as an organization. There's a lot of discussion about why: the switch from being independent to being part of Microsoft, having resources pushed to Copilot instead of core service, the organization structure itself, a reliance on vibe coding, etc etc.Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it's clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven't abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don't think inertia is enough to sustain a company.1. https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
• sbinnee
  GitHub has become a place where you seek people’s attention. There are other places you can freely host your projects. GitLab was always available. I just haven’t logged in for I don’t know how long. An open source project is essentially a show window to the internet by a lonely developer. Ghostty has already established a great community. It’s already on display on a skyscraper. The project is mature enough that it needs a dedicated discussion forum or something like that. I am excited to see where it will find home and how it will evolve.
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  JuniperMesos
  I can appreciate Hashimoto's genuine feelings about Github, and the world of open-source software development that it opened for him and that he spent a significant chunk of his life participating in.On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical. Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.I've also used Github for a significant chunk of my life, often because I had to for my job. But I've never developed an emotional attachment to it. Indeed, I have long been annoyed that Github is someone else's proprietary software, that does what it can to structurally lock users into their platform despite being built upon free-software git.I've never been able to love software that requires an email-based account and accepting terms of service and that doesn't work in Iran because the company that runs it obeys US sanctions law.So without reservation on my end, I'm glad to see that ghostty is moving off of github to something else.
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  atonse
  During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea."There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
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  nimbius
  >It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.Has anyone else shared this sentiment? If so Redmond needs to lean in hard.this is an absolute killing blow for Microsoft if it gains real traction. You made developers your cornerstone eight years ago for nearly 8 billion dollars. you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids.Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.
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  arn3n
  What do we think is more to blame for GitHub's massive decrease in quality? I've heard the following theories:1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.Perhaps it's a bit of both.
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  nextaccountic
  > To the "Git is distributed!" crowd: the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.A suggestion: use git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug in addition to migrating to another forge like Codeberg. It saves issues, PRs etc in git itself (not on a branch - on a specially crafted ref). It offers two way sync with a lot of providers.Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)
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  eiiot
  This seems like a great opportunity for new platforms who are rethinking the OSS space to finally gain the traction they need to be effective. For a collaborative platform, quantity is key, and I am hopeful that someone who is interested in advancing the software space will become the new go-to. This isn't to say that GitHub hasn't been innovating, but at least from my perspective, the way we've used git for the past however-many-years has remained basically constant.Some projects that seem interesting: - https://tangled.org/ seems to be building out cool and exciting ways to write and interact with code (and they're distributed on the ATProto! But notably that's not their core selling point) - Microservices like https://pico.sh/ and https://sr.ht/ feel like fresh air...
• tux033
  From a security perspective, centralization cuts both ways.Large platforms like GitHub have strong security teams and fast patching, but they also concentrate risk. A single vulnerability or abuse pattern can affect a huge portion of the ecosystem.Decentralizing critical infrastructure doesn’t eliminate risk, but it distributes it.What It Means for Open Source, Infrastructure and Security: https://tux.re/forum/viewtopic.php?t=183
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  infogulch
  I'm happy that raw git + mailing lists works great for the linux project, but can the rest of us all agree we actually do need issues & PRs? And that it's super painful to lose all this context when platform hopping, or when the service unilaterally decides to deplatform someone?So where are we going? Mitchell will be deciding for Ghostty. If github's current trajectory is anything to go by, everyone else will need to decide where to go sooner rather than later.I'm worried that it will be a Babel scattering event and this open source superpower that github catalyzed (how to describe it?) will just evaporate.I'm also worried that wherever we go next could have the same fate as github.So what then? Radicle is the only thing that I've seen that could theoretically 'solve' the problem, though it still needs a lot of work: https://radicle.dev/
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  incognito124
  Not surprised, I think I was subconsciously waiting for this as Mitchell has been very vocal about Github on X. They killed a lot of developer goodwill, and I feel this is just a start of the mass exodus.Good luck to the team with migration! (And here's hoping it's ersc :))
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  hmokiguess
  > I know I work at GitHub so that might sound heretical, but I promise it’s not controversial for me to say it. Very few people internally believe that PRs and issues are ideal primitives for the future of engineering. And there are a lots of us inside the machine exploring what comes next.From GitHub's Staff Research Engineer https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/
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  sudb
  I'm very interested in where ghostty ends up - I wonder if they'll follow Zig to Codeberg?It does seem like it might, in general, be a very opportune time for GitLab (or another host) to publicly step up!There seems to be a lot of chatter on X recently about wanting an entirely new GitHub usurper that doesn't look like GitHub at all, but in the short- to medium-term I expect this not to gain a huge amount of traction because of the sheer cultural embeddedness of git + GitHub in modern day software development.
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  funkaster
  I really like forgejo, but for OSS it's a complete no-no unless they want to manage PRs by email. Maintaining a forgejo instance and allowing anyone to join is a recipe for headaches. Until forgejo figures out the federation aspect (allow to send PRs from other forgejo instances, or some other distributed way), it will be hard for OSS to adopt them and keep the collaboration aspect.
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  varun_ch
  I don’t know if it’s production ready yet, but tangled.org is a really interesting take on a forge and I’ve been watching it for a while. It decentralizes the centralized parts of GitHub in a pretty neat way. The biggest problem with forges that aren’t GitHub is people need to make and manage all these different accounts for each place they contribute (which almost certainly will lower the amount of people who do. Maybe this is a good thing these days though...)Tangled uses the identity stuff from atproto which lets the important stuff (git, CI, etc) be decentralized while people only need one identity to contribute (and you can self host your PDS too). So nothing ends up being reliant on a third party.
• DrTung
  A remnant of the old GitHub still remains, try surfing to a non-existing repositor like https://github.com/NowIsTheTimeForAllGoodMenToComeToTheAidOf...(however the parallax scrolling of the background is gone, maybe when Microsoft arrived)
• kid64
  An obvious pivot would be to Codeberg. Is there some missing feature there rendering such a move less desirable than I imagine?
• _doctor_love
  Reading the write-up again, this really struck me:It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.Github is really Microsoft. The above paragraph captures perfectly what it's like to work in a big company like Microsoft.When Github was a startup, it was both a tech company and a social media for coders and a real-life social scene (especially in SF, some pretty epic stories over the years).Once Github was acquired, it was a countdown to all the soul being sucked out of it and simply a mechanism being left behind.
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  featherless
  I migrated my entire workflow onto a personal GitLab instance after the whole "pay a fee to bring your own bags to the grocery store" GitHub Actions pricing shenanigans earlier this year.Best decision ever.100% uptime. 100% less stress with each of the product/pricing changes over the past few months.Was also able to build my own GitHub Copilot equivalent that auto-reviews MRs interactively.Highly recommend it.
• senko
  On a much smaller scale (niche personal projects), I'm also planning to leave Github (probably for a local forgejo or even gitweb).The vast majority of features GH offers are of no use to me. In fact, in the age of vibe coding, zero-friction drive-by contributions are a net negative. The UX has been steadily dropping for years. The recent abysmal record in availability and bugs is just the last drop in the bucket.The writing was on the wall the day they were acquired. They had a good run, but those days are long over.
• LelouBil
  The downfall of GitHub is sad, having a centralized way to find cool open source software is amazing. I use the feed of what people I'm following are starring, tags and code search to find amazing and interesting projects, and I'm afraid I'll be missing out on great but hidden software since there is fragmentation when people leave GitHub.And the search capabilities of alternative Forges are not the same (Mostly due to costs I assume)
• daft_pink
  It's odd. I've been having the same feeling as well. Earlier this week, they sent that email about copilot, which I don't use but pay $10 a month for and I canceled my subscription.
• caymanjim
  You're not alone. At my company, we're now making plans to self-host our Git and CICD. I probably can't sell them on Gitea+Drone or Forgejo or another open-source solution (even though it'd suit us well), but we're still going to find a solution that isn't dependent on someone else's platform not sucking.
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  WadeGrimridge
  Mitchell on what he'd do if he was in charge of GitHub:https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168
• dueyfinster
  It is sad to see how far GitHub has fallen. Will also be interesting to where mitchellh takes the project, I imagine codeberg and sources are possibilities.I looked up my own ID and GitHub join date from the API, all the way back in 2009: https://api.github.com/users/dueyfinster
• tempestnick
  This is not the large ElasticSearch outage they had on April 27, 2026. This blog post was written a week before that, so this was a different outage.I have nothing to add to this. Comedy gold.
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  duxup
  Help me out here because I honestly don't know / must have a different workflow.Are other people being impacted every day by github outages?What does that look like?I'm not saying the writer is wrong, I'm just wondering how folks who experience this every day work / how that exposure plays out / what it is.
• underdeserver
  Those footnotes - "no, not that outage" - are damning.
• arjie
  Github has been all right for me because I don't do too much collaboration and I prefer not having to worry about the security implications. But it just struck me that I have my own infrastructure on Tailscale. I could probably just use Github as an alternate remote and use my own infrastructure to store the code. I imagine a gix + axum + maud should be able to give me my own git web host.The existing open web hosts are just super heavy. 512 MiB minimum RAM and stuff is totally unnecessary though I have hundreds of gigabytes of the stuff. And then you need all these DSL YAMLs around and a job runner etc. I think I could probably fit the whole thing into a much smaller size. And I have kube running already so job management isn't the hardest thing in the world. Nightmare for SOC2 perhaps. I guess we'll see.I think this is all home-forgeable now. The advantage of Github for OP was the social aspect, clearly, but I don't use it for that. And I'm a really late user 7,322,596 from 2014!
• rarisma
  I think GitHub has completely lost the plot over the last year or so, I don't think the stuff I work on will leave any time soon but I'm slowly losing my patience with github.The other week I spent about an hour trying to figure out why my actions jobs were just stuck on waiting and not starting.For my personal stuff, I think I'm going to migrate to either my own selfhosted instance of something like gitea or codeberg, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore imo for GitHub, even with stuff like free runners and pages.I personally think this is mainly attributed to GH Copilot and I would love to know if MS/GH even makes a profit on it.
• rgbrgb
  >I’ll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months. We have a plan but I'm also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS).what a cliff hanger!As someone with similar warm feelings for GitHub, it's kind of sad to see the fragmentation but I have similar frustrations with the recent outages. Perhaps it's time to explore the idea of unbundling the social/discovery layer from the code hosting/dev tool so we can live between the myriad git/jj hosts but still do "social coding" together.
• oybng
  The writing was already on the wall when MS required logins to search code just 48 hours after acquisition
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  BigTTYGothGF
  > During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub.I realize that everybody is different, but this still doesn't seem like the best of practices.
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  preommr
  > past month I’ve kept a journal where I put an “X” next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an XIs it really this bad?I've seen people complain about Github, but I thought it was more of a theoretical inconvenience rather than a real practical one. As in, the uptime for a serious software company should be 99.9, but two hours down just today, and constant outages over the month that they noticed... that seems way worse.
• anon
  undefined
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  hmokiguess
  GitHub has a north star now, it's called "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish".https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
• _doctor_love
  Meta-observation: GitHub's quality is so bad that Mitchell has to clarify in his writeup which recent outage he is talking about!!!
• samtrack2019
  why not just setting up github enterprise? i mean it's still an infra to take care but if you are willing to pay for it, you may as well? from my experience the other git forge doesnt provide the same feature sets and api as github, like gitlab ci is actually pretty limited compared to GHA, there is no concept of github apps for other providers too, but maybe you just want a code hosting..
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  chrisweekly
  Luke Wroblewski posted this earlier today: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lukew_small-taste-of-the-inco...The shape of the curve helps make it a little easier to understand why availability has been so abysmal.
• ryanisnan
  This comment doesn't add anything novel to the discussion, but is worth adding I think because hubbers and MSFT folks read HN - I too am evaluating leaving personally. Professionally, we're talking about it loosely, and if it continues it will become an increasing likelihood.
• farfatched
  There's clearly opportunity for a GitHub replacement that can operate reliably at scale.I support Forgejo and Codeberg, but it's not clear that its architecture can scale to GitHub levels.Microsoft subsidises a lot of OSS development. Who has equally big pockets?
• thomasfl
  If Github were shut down, it would feel even worse than if Hacker News was shot down. I am github user 1520. Signed up a just few days after Mithcel on february 2008. I remember the early days sitting in a hotel lobby next to Chris Wanstrath and discussing a bug I found on github. Not ready to do the switch yet.
• mkw5053
  Just checked and I'm Github user 2,040,833https://api.github.com/users/<username>
• fareesh
  i empathize with the folks running a largely free service who are being spammed by bots and built everything around some other assumptions
• muragekibicho
  OP takes issue with GitHub's constant outages and alludes to agents (and Copilot bloat) as the primary cause.Lots of big services are like this. Google Colab's 'Connect to Drive' is down as we speak. I'm up right now because I know my Runpod VM in Kentucky is going to die rather abruptly and I'll need to manually get it up.Everything has its flaws.Microsoft lets you host your code, websites and media for free and
• stabbles
  Is "migration to azure" or "microsoft acquisition" a cause or a symptom?I'm wondering to what extent the natural life cycle of SaaS products comes down to: the company grows, the old guard with good technical taste move on, bad technical decisions are made, quality declines, users move on.
• debo_
  GitHub literally getting ghosted
• basilikum
  I never had any positive relation to Github. Free software should be developed on free platforms. So I very much welcome this. Fuck Github. Every single outage Microslop vibe codes is a good thing.But it's very interesting to read about the author's very different perspective. User 1299 in 2008 is wild. His Github account could share the Radler I'm drinking right now with me.I see that it's genuinely sad, but proprietary software and services make you completely dependent on someone else. If you want to rely on something for the future it has to be FOSS, everything else is a rug that will be pulled under your feet eventually.
• mikeputnam
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
• toastal
  We are finally getting closer to me getting to delete my last account with Microsoft. Nixpkgs: please follow suit.
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  qsera
  What I want to see is Linux kernel leaving GitHub...Always had a bad feeling about it being hosted at somewhere controlled by Microsoft..
• erelong
  's been dead since microsoft acquired them in 2018
• butterlesstoast
  > I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there.This hit me pretty hard. I hope GitHub finds its way sooner rather than later.
• xswhiskey
  Possibly in a few years from now we'll get actual data about how many outages we've seen or how much have x services degraded, overlapped with the push for "AI everywhere".
• vvpan
  I, honestly, do not care about Github. As just a career dev it gives no utility except that a lot of the open source projects are on there.
• maxclark
  "The timing of this is coincidental with the large outage on April 27, 2026."This PS is as impactful as the body of the post.
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  contact9879
  the issue is where to go?codeberg, self-hosted forgejo, gitlab, still-beta sourcehut, tangled? github was “the git community” and now it’s fracturing—you need accounts everywhere, you can’t easily discover neat projectsi like tangled if only because it’s built on atproto which emphasizes ownership and transferability of identity: something that would make the move off github so much easier
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  scottyah
  Are that many companies really using github? None of the handful of companies I've worked for have used a public repo.
• aykutseker
  about to launch my first open source project in days. reading this with a knot. github used to be a default; now it's a decision. and watching mitchellh agonize publicly is the honest preview every new maintainer gets from now on.
• bluegatty
  Best alternative list anyone?
• sholladay
  Imagine if MS just did a git revert all the way back to ~2020. That was peak GitHub for me. We got some niceties the first couple of years after the acquisition - free private repos, Sponsors, secret scanning, a new mobile app and CLI - but things were still pretty stable, before their architecture and the little UX touches got destroyed.What a timeline that would be. One can dream.
• anon
  undefined
• VadimPR
  The question is where do you go?
• zoogeny
  If I was OpenAI / Anthropic, I would see this as a massive opportunity.I mean, why wouldn't you want to consolidate git repos, a heroku/fly.io/vercel like container system and direct access to web-based coding tools. They have the coding models and agents, slap a web interface over Claude Code running in a container, allow for commits and deploys. Control the entire stack.
• tommica
  Maybe you could start a new github - create the job you always wanted!
• tonymet
  Hear me out: Github needs ads . If option A is downtime (and data integrity issues), Ads are more favorable. The terminal UI and PRs are both captive real estate that developers have to pay attention to.There is a simple cost equation of 40-100x demand vs a fixed op-ex budget for the org. Github can either 40x their paying customer fees or try to monetize all of the free vibecoder (and open source) traffic.
• y0ssar1an
  pack it up. we're going to codeberg.
• darkteflon
  Copilot showing up unbidden on my PRs was the final straw for me. Well, actually, the final straw was not being able to figure out how to turn it off.We all saw this coming when the Microsoft acquisition happened. They constitutionally can’t not fuck their products up.
• keybored
  I thought that Ghostty was a company that had partnered with GitHub. But no it’s a popular open source application.So they will move their CI and issue tracker somewhere else.And this will be largely a springboard for “people are leaving the ship huh” and misc. GitHub demise discussions.
• lostmsu
  Sadly I feel the same way towards Windows.
• velcrovan
  > To the "Git is distributed!" crowd: the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.Yet again, I wish the prevailing SCMS were more like Fossil, where issues and forum posts, at least, are part of the repository (and everything lives in a single sqlite file). (Of course Fossil actively opposes "pull requests", separate issue)
• shevy-java
  > Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub.Well, he is not alone with that. Something isn't working - and Microsoft either does not realise it, or does not care. I think the microslop strategy consumed Microsoft internally; it seems unable to change trajectory now. It's like you are driving to a cliff, in a car but you are not the main driver. It's quite interesting to see though - people can now expect "which disaster will hit Github tomorrow".On the other hand, I also think it is time that Github gets some serious competition. Gitlab is not that competition; codeberg also not really (they'd need to up the useful features by a LOT and keep on driving that - I just don't see they have enough energy and momentum for that, but as a smaller source code hosting platform they are not bad either).
• fridder
  It really has been infuriating lately. Between this and my company's proxy screwing with HTTP/2 at least once a day the frustration is very very real. While I'm nowhere as invested in GitHub its decline does make me sad.
• ChrisArchitect
  Related:An Update on GitHub Availabilityhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422
• anon
  undefined
• krainboltgreene
  The unspoken reality of github: It would be significantly better both as a product and a vehicle in our economy if it was entirely worker owned.
• slekker
  I could recommend trying out source hut!
• OtomotO
  I find that so fascinating... I know GitHub since decades.Over said decades I've worked on countless (open source) projects there.Professionally? 1 project in all those years. Yes, exactly 1 (still there).Every single other project was either in bitbucket, gitlab, gitea, forgejo or... I am sure I forgot some forge.What I am trying to convey is: fascinating how "everything is on GitHub" is a very american way to see the world.
• stratigos
  All of this and more entered my mind the very moment I learned that Microsoft had acquired GitHub.
• josefritzishere
  I'm sensing a trend
• anon
  undefined
• cmrdporcupine
  I'm not sure how we ever could have expected GitHub to continue with or add quality when being built by the same company that also builds MS Teams. There are clearly the wrong quality levers at work inside Microsoft.Yes, it seemed like Microsoft had a brief interregnum period of about 10 years where they seemed to have a renaissance and a genuine culture change and a concern for quality and initiative seemed to take hold.And for many of us who came into the industry in the 90s this was a strange period because actually post-Gates/Balmer MS suddenly seem not so bad?But that was until the first deals with OpenAI and the first round of layoffs. After Musk's purges at Twitter, MS was the first to really join in the fray.Since then the old MS is back. Clearly as Machiavellian as in the past. But kind of sadder and more pathetic.But honestly I'm also a bit confused by the framing some people have this thread because I remember GitHub always having reliability issues in its early days. It and Twitter were both famous RoR projects with notorious and constant outage issues in the 2008/2009 time-frame.
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  sergiotapia
  Github was not built for a world where its userbase quadrupled and are pumping in generated slop at non-stop pace.
• joeblogsmomma
  [dead]
• selectively
  GitHub is fine.
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  nickdothutton
  As an aside, I always wondered why GitHub had a web interface. Admittedly I’m a pre-web SCCS/RCS “old timer” but I wouldn't have put a web interface on it at all.