On April 28, 2026, Mitchell Hashimoto — creator of the Ghostty terminal and HashiCorp co-founder — announced that Ghostty is leaving GitHub. He is GitHub user #1299, having joined in February 2008 and used the platform daily for 18 years. What pushed him out was not Git but the surrounding services: issues, pull requests, and Actions kept failing. For the past month he kept a journal, marking an “X” beside every day a GitHub outage hurt his work. His verdict: “Almost every day has an X.” The post shot to the top of Hacker News with 3,521 points and 1,051 comments — the biggest developer-infrastructure story of the week.
The reason it matters: GitHub hosts the delivery pipeline of a huge share of the industry’s teams — code review, CI, and project tracking all sit on it. When the maintainer of a first-tier open source project leaves publicly, citing reliability, it is a warning shot to everyone whose ship-from-commit-to-production flow depends on one vendor staying up.
An X for Every Broken Day
Hashimoto described the ritual plainly: any day an outage got in the way of his work earned an X in his journal, and almost every day earned one. On the day he wrote the post, a GitHub Actions outage blocked his pull request reviews for roughly two hours. Separately, an April 28 incident made pull requests fail outright because of an Elasticsearch problem. His conclusion was blunt: a platform that blocks you for hours a day, every day, is “no longer a place for serious work.”
What Broke Wasn’t Git
The line he draws is worth pausing on. Git — the distributed version control system — is not the problem; it works offline by design. What broke is the commercial layer GitHub sells: issues, pull requests, Actions, the collaboration infrastructure. Hashimoto’s critique is not “abandon version control” but “outsourcing your collaboration layer to a vendor whose reliability is slipping gets more expensive every quarter.” He was candid about the emotional weight, too: “Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. I want to ship software and it doesn’t want me to ship software.”
No New Home Chosen Yet
Unlike most high-profile migrations, there is no destination announced. Hashimoto says he is “still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS),” with details to come over the following months. Three things are settled: the migration will happen “as incrementally as possible”; a read-only mirror will stay on GitHub at the current URL; and his personal projects remain there for now, because Ghostty is where he, the maintainers, and the community are hit hardest. He also apologized for recent public criticism of GitHub — he says he has “hurt people’s feelings” — but a return would be “predicated on real results and improvements, not words and promises.”
The Risk of One SaaS for Everything
The Register’s coverage adds context that post-acquisition fears about Microsoft-owned GitHub had “largely proved unfounded” — but the growing instability lands right as Microsoft shifts its attention to AI. The same outlet’s recent trail includes forced CLI telemetry and Copilot sign-ups paused under capacity strain. The lesson for product teams is structural: your development pipeline is a SaaS supply chain. When PR review, CI, or issue tracking goes down, the outage is paid for directly in engineer-hours, a cost that shows up in no dashboard.
What to Audit Before You Migrate
First, verify your Git workflow runs fully offline. Local clones and bundle backups are the floor for any migration plan. Second, inventory platform lock-in: Actions workflows, issue templates, bot integrations, SSO. That is where the real migration cost lives — the code itself is always the easiest part to move. Third, write the incident script now: if PR review dies for two hours tomorrow, what is the fallback? Most teams should not follow Hashimoto out the door, but every team should have a “GitHub is unavailable tomorrow” playbook. His journal method — logging the actual damage each outage causes — is the single most stealable idea here: it turns platform risk from vague anxiety into a number you can act on.
Sources
- Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub — Mitchell Hashimoto
- HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’ — The Register
- Ghostty is leaving GitHub — Hacker News
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.