By ByteBot
When Your Biggest Fans Walk Away
Mitchell Hashimoto, GitHub user #1299 who joined in February 2008, announced this week he’s moving his Ghostty terminal project away from GitHub after 18 years on the platform. The HashiCorp co-founder and creator of Vagrant and Terraform documented months of daily GitHub outages blocking his work for hours at a time. His announcement came during a GitHub Actions outage on April 27, though he clarifies the decision was months in planning.
“I love GitHub more than a person should love a thing,” Hashimoto wrote, “and I’m mad at it.”
When someone who created projects partly to impress your company, who opened your site almost daily for nearly two decades, walks away crying—you don’t have an isolated complaint. You have a platform crisis.
The Reliability Numbers Don’t Lie
GitHub experienced 65+ incidents in just two months earlier this year: 37 in February, 28 in March. Third-party tracking shows 90.21% uptime over the past 90 days—far below the “three nines” (99.9%) SLA the platform promises. Hashimoto kept a journal marking each day GitHub outages blocked his work. “Almost every day has an X,” he noted.
The March 2026 availability report documents specific failures: On March 5, GitHub Actions was degraded for over three hours (16:24-19:30 UTC), with 95% of workflow runs failing to start within five minutes. On February 2, a security policy misconfiguration on backend storage blocked all VM operations—create, delete, reimage—completely.
“It’s no longer a place for serious work if it blocks you out for hours per day,” Hashimoto concluded.
Not an Isolated Incident
Ghostty isn’t the first major project to leave. In December 2025, the Zig programming language migrated to Codeberg, a nonprofit alternative, citing GitHub’s “rotted engineering culture” and AI obsession. Zig lead Andrew Kelly pointed to a critical bug in GitHub Actions that hung servers indefinitely—reported in April 2025, fixed in August, but the support thread left open for months.
The Zig Foundation went further: They severed their $170,000 annual GitHub Sponsors revenue, calling the financial dependency a strategic “liability.” Their reasoning? “GitHub no longer demonstrates commitment to engineering excellence.”
The pattern is clear. Infrastructure reliability is being sacrificed for AI features.
AI Load Meets Infrastructure Reality
Industry analysis from InfoQ points to systemic issues: “When eight different components fail in eight different ways over two months, the problem isn’t isolated incidents—it’s systemic brittleness.” GitHub wasn’t architected for millions of AI coding agents generating massive concurrent commit and PR volumes. The platform prioritized AI features while infrastructure buckled under the load those features created.
As one developer quipped on the Hacker News thread (which hit #1 with 737 points and 194 comments): “GitHub Actions can’t even be called Swiss cheese anymore.”
Where Do Developers Go From Here?
Hashimoto is evaluating alternatives: Codeberg (nonprofit, community-owned, where Zig landed), GitLab (enterprise all-in-one), and self-hosted options like Gitea or Forgejo. A read-only mirror will remain on GitHub, but Ghostty’s active development moves elsewhere. The destination isn’t finalized—he’s in discussions with multiple providers.
The alternative platforms in 2026 all support direct migration of issues, pull requests, and wikis. The technical barriers to leaving are lower than ever. What remains is network effects: 100 million developers are on GitHub because everyone else is.
But network effects erode when the network stops working.
The Bigger Question
This isn’t just about one terminal emulator. It’s a test: When early adopters who love your platform walk away—user #1299, someone who joined 18 years ago, someone with “irrationally personal” attachment—do you listen?
Hashimoto left the door open: “I’d love to come back one day, but this will have to be predicated on real results and improvements, not words and promises.”
For the 100 million developers watching, the question isn’t whether GitHub will respond. It’s whether their response will be infrastructure investment or press releases. We’ll find out which when we see whether this trickle becomes a flood.
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