Almost every day has an X. This is no longer a place for serious work.
For nearly two decades, Mitchell Hashimoto built his work and identity inside GitHub, joining as its 1,299th user in 2008 and watching it become the connective tissue of modern software development. But April's relentless cascade of outages — marked day after day in a private journal of blocked work — finally broke something that loyalty alone could not hold together. His decision to move Ghostty, his most meaningful project, off the platform is less a technical migration than a quiet reckoning: even the most devoted inhabitants of a place will leave when the ground beneath it stops holding.
- GitHub suffered near-daily outages throughout April, with failures lasting hours and blocking core workflows like pull request reviews and CI pipelines.
- Hashimoto began documenting each disruption, and the accumulation of X marks in his journal made the pattern undeniable — this was no longer bad luck, it was structural.
- The crisis extends beyond one developer: OpenAI reportedly began exploring its own internal code repository just to guarantee access to its own source code.
- Hashimoto announced Ghostty will migrate off GitHub, marking a symbolic rupture — a founding-era user with 18 years of daily presence choosing to leave his most important work behind.
- He left the door open to returning if stability is restored, but the message to GitHub's leadership is unambiguous: long-term loyalty has a breaking point, and that point is now visible.
April was brutal for GitHub. Nearly every day brought an outage, and for Mitchell Hashimoto — creator of the beloved terminal emulator Ghostty — the pattern became impossible to dismiss. He began keeping a journal, marking each day his work was blocked. The X's filled the page almost without interruption.
Hashimoto is no casual user. He joined GitHub in 2008 as its 1,299th member, and for eighteen years visited the platform multiple times daily. He built Ghostty there. He lived there the way developers do — in issues, pull requests, and commits. GitHub was where he was most at home.
But the outages stopped feeling like anomalies and started feeling like the platform's new character. On the day he wrote about his decision, GitHub Actions had been down for two hours. He couldn't review pull requests. He couldn't work. The irony was not lost on him: GitHub was built to solve the problem of unreliable infrastructure, and now it had become the bottleneck. Reports that OpenAI was exploring its own internal code repository — just to guarantee access to its own source — suggested the problem had grown beyond inconvenience into something structural.
Hashimoto's response was measured. Ghostty, the project that carries his name and reputation, would leave. Personal projects would stay. He didn't yet know where Ghostty would go, and he remained open to returning if things stabilized. But he could not build something that mattered on a foundation that crumbled almost daily.
What makes the departure significant is not the act itself, but who is performing it. Hashimoto is a founding-era user with nearly two decades of loyalty — someone who helped shape the platform's culture. His willingness to leave signals something GitHub cannot afford to ignore: the users most committed to the platform are precisely the ones with the expertise and the options to walk away when it fails them.
April was brutal for GitHub. Nearly every day brought an outage. For Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Ghostty—a terminal emulator that has earned genuine affection in developer circles—the pattern became impossible to ignore. He started keeping a journal, marking each day when GitHub's failures blocked his work. The X's accumulated almost without interruption.
Hashimoto is not a casual user. He opened a GitHub account in 2008, making him the 1,299th person ever to do so. For eighteen years, he visited the platform multiple times daily. He watched it grow from a novel idea into the infrastructure that powers modern software development. He built Ghostty there. He lived there, in the way developers do—reading issues, reviewing code, pushing commits, thinking through problems in pull requests. GitHub was where he was happiest.
But something shifted. The outages started coming with a frequency that moved beyond inconvenience into something that threatened the basic premise of the platform: that it would be there when you needed it. On the day Hashimoto wrote about his decision, GitHub Actions had been down for two hours. He couldn't review pull requests. He couldn't work. This wasn't a rare failure. This was the pattern.
The irony is sharp: GitHub itself was built to solve the problem of unreliable infrastructure. It emerged as a response to the fragility of earlier systems. Now it was becoming the bottleneck. OpenAI, according to reports, had begun exploring building its own code repository system just to guarantee access to its own source code. If a company of that scale was considering abandoning the platform, the problem had moved beyond a technical hiccup into something structural.
Hashimoto's response was measured but clear. He announced that Ghostty—his significant work, the project that carries his name and reputation—would leave GitHub. His personal projects would stay. But the serious work, the thing that matters, would migrate elsewhere. He didn't yet know where. He was open to returning if GitHub stabilized. But he couldn't build something important on a foundation that crumbled almost daily.
What makes this departure significant is not that one developer left. It's who left. Hashimoto is not a casual user complaining on Twitter. He's a founding-era user with nearly two decades of loyalty. He's someone who helped shape the culture of the platform. His departure signals something GitHub's leadership cannot ignore: the people most committed to the platform are the ones most willing to leave when it fails them. They have options. They have the expertise to migrate. And they're running out of patience.
Citas Notables
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, in a blog post announcing his departure
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why does it matter that Hashimoto specifically is leaving? There are millions of GitHub users.
Because he's not a casual user. He's been there since 2008. He's the kind of person who shaped how developers think about the platform. When someone like that leaves, it's a signal that the problem isn't theoretical—it's real enough to overcome eighteen years of habit.
He said he doesn't know where Ghostty is going next. Does that suggest he hasn't thought this through?
No. It suggests he's serious. He's not moving to a competitor he already knew about. He's willing to explore options, to build something new, because staying put has become worse than the friction of leaving.
GitHub could argue these are temporary problems, that they're investing in fixes.
They could. But Hashimoto kept a journal. He marked almost every day in April. That's not a temporary problem—that's a pattern. And he's documenting it publicly, which means other developers are now thinking about whether they should do the same.
What happens if major projects start leaving?
GitHub loses its gravity. Right now it's the default. If that changes, if developers start fragmenting across platforms, the network effect that made GitHub dominant starts to reverse. That's the real risk.
Is this about money? Could GitHub fix this if it wanted to?
Almost certainly. But it requires investment and prioritization. The question is whether GitHub's owners see reliability as urgent enough. Hashimoto's departure suggests they don't—not yet.