In April 2026, Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of HashiCorp) moved his terminal project, Ghostty, off GitHub. He’d been on the platform for roughly eighteen years. His parting verdict was that GitHub had become “no longer a place for serious work.”

He isn’t alone, and he isn’t a crank. A lot of people are mad at GitHub right now, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.

But, of all the services you could be locked into, GItHub should be one of the easiest to walk away from. Your code is just files, and as it happens, files that already live on your own computer.

So with all that fury, and an open door, you’d expect an exodus. There isn’t one. People are furious, but they are staying.

That contradiction has a one-word explanation. When you follow that word, it explains almost everything that’s strange about GitHub today — why it keeps breaking, why people can’t leave, and how it actually makes money.

GitHub has an uptime issue

When the dependable stops being dependable

One independent incident tracker logged 48 major outages in a single 12-month stretch, out of more than 250 incidents in total. And the worst-hit service, by a wide margin, was GitHub actions, with 57 disruptions of its own.

These outages are felt by everyone. On May 15, one GitHub Actions failure knocked out roughly 42% of all workflow runs at once. Any business that relies on Actions stops. Because other services also lean on Actions, a single stumble can drag GitHub pages and parts of Copilot down with it.

The downtime isn’t the single source of anger on its own though. Before that, in August 2025, GitHub’s CEO resigned — and Microsoft didn’t replace him. Instead, Microsoft folded GitHub into CoreAI (its in-house AI division) and effectively skipped the need for a CEO.

This is considering that back in 2018, when Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion, it promised that the platform would stay independent. That pretense formally ended in 2025. GitHub is a department inside Microsoft’s AI org.

So: an unreliable tool, owned by a giant that’s busy reabsorbing it. You can see why people are eyeing the exits.

I’ve felt this way for a long time, but for the 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 X. On the day I am writing this post, I’ve been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.

— Mitchell Hashimoto

The exit is wide open

The code was never the thing keeping people in GitHub

This is exactly what makes all the rage so strange. Leaving should be trivial.

The “git” in GitHub is Git — the version-control system Linus Torvalds designed to be decentralized. Every time you copy a repository, you get the whole thing. Your code already exists, in full, on every machine that has ever cloned it.

Which means you could move every repository you own to an alternative (or to a spare laptop in your closet) this very afternoon. Nobody will stop you.

So if the code walks free, and the anger is real, what on earth is nailing the door shut?

GitHub Actions is the word

It runs everything but it won’t come with you

It’s worth understanding GitHub Actions even if you’ve never written a line of code. Actions is automation. The industry term is CI/CD (continuous integration and deployment) but this is the best plain English explanation I can muster: it’s a robot that wakes up the instant you save your work, then runs your tests, assembles your app, and pushes it out to users, all on its own.

You list the steps in a small text file and GitHub’s servers handle the rest. You don’t even need to be a programmer to lean on it — people use it to back up data on a schedule, scrape pages, or mail themselves a weekly report.

Can’t developers build and test the apps on their own machines? Well, they can, but then the statement would be “it works on my machine,” which isn’t saying much. To test the apps, devs need sterile machines, from different platforms. Linux, macOS, Windows, in various configurations. GitHub provides all of these machines, automatically, and runs the builds, tests, and deployment all on its own.

GitHub Actions is why GitHub is so difficult to leave. Your code is portable, but your workflows are not. The triggers, the saved passwords and keys, the way it all threads through the review process — none of those clone. If you pack up and leave, you’ll have to build it all from scratch.

The truth is, GitHub stopped being a hard drive a long time ago. Add up Actions, Packages, Pages, Codespaces, Copilot, and Depandabot, and you’ll see that GitHub is a full operating system for developing and shipping software.

The real irony is that this same feature that keeps people from leaving GitHub, is also the answer to the other riddle: why GitHub keep falling over.

Everyone’s looting GitHub Actions

A free computer that runs anything is a temptation few can resist

So GitHub will run whatever steps you hand it, on its own machines, often for free. You can probably guess where this goes. If you can’t, look up the PurpleUrchin campaign, where abusers used around a million free GitHub accounts to hijack GitHub’s free compute and use it to mine crypto, which cost GitHub millions of dollars.

You can even download YouTube videos through GitHub Actions, for free and in the highest quality possible. Other people have used it to scrape sites, crunch datasets, or run compute-hungry experiments and let GitHub pick up the power bill. All sorts of things.

But, all of the abuse aside, GitHub Actions and its runners are also, of course, widely used by legit businesses and devs, for the the intended purpose. The point I’m trying to communicate here is that GitHub isn’t suddenly failing at being a cloud storage for code, because cloud storage is now only one of the many things that it provides.

The most-abused service is Actions. The most-broken service is also Actions. To top it all off, the reason why people can’t quit GitHub is also Actions.

Actions bills by the minute once you’re past the free tier — fractions of a cent that compound across millions of repositories. And the real engine now is Copilot, GitHub’s AI assistant, which has reportedly crossed $2 billion in annual recurring revenue, with Microsoft reporting roughly 4.7 million paying subscribers in early 2026 — up about 75% in a single year.

The repositories are the loss leader. The robots — the automation, the AI — pay the rent. Which is exactly why Microsoft slid GitHub into its AI division and didn’t bother hiring a new boss. To Microsoft, this was never a code archive. It’s an AI channel with 150 million developers already standing inside it. Of course they’re going to wire the AI deeper, outages or not.

No one’s going anywhere (for now)

So no, you and I, despite our smaller workflows, almost certainly won’t quit GitHub tomorrow. The bigger developers and companies are even less likely to leave.

The lock is softer than it feels. Alternatives like Forgejo, Gitea, and the community-run Codeberg now offer their own Actions that use the very same config syntax. The workflows are more portable than they were a year ago. And the code, remember, was always free to leave.

But, softer isn’t soft. Without GitHub, even with alternatives, developers have to run their own servers, mind their own runners, and give up the gravity of the largest developer network on the planet. For most companies and developers today, that math just doesn’t close. Yet.