It's 10:00 p.m. Do you know where your children are? I don't know where mine are because I'm too busy working on pushing commit final final V2 actual fix to GitHub. Unfortunately, if you're one of the 100 million plus developers who use GitHub, you may have encountered a message like this recently. Or maybe all of your pull requests just disappeared completely. Or maybe the search returns nothing. Or your continuous integration actions just hang in the void. GitHub is easily the most important website in software engineering. But more and more developers are yelling at it and in some cases literally crying like it's a broken vending machine that ate their last dollar. Well, finally, yesterday things hit the point of no return after legendary developer Mitchell Hashimoto did the unthinkable. He packed up his open source project Ghostly and is leaving GitHub for good in search of greener pastures. >> Um and this fall I'm going to take my talents to South Beach. In today's video, we'll find out what the hell happened to GitHub and why. It is April 30th, 2026 and you are watching The Code Report. In 2008, GitHub was built with Ruby on Rails as an online platform to manage your software source code with a relatively new technology called Git, which is the version control system built by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to manage the source code of Linux. The pitch was simple. You take the command line nightmare you are senior engineer keeps yelling about, give it a web UI, make it like Facebook for code, and suddenly every developer on Earth has a public coding profile. It works so well that by 2018, Microsoft bought it for 7.5 billion dollars. And today, it hosts over 420 million failed side projects and effectively is the public record of software. If it isn't on GitHub, it might as well not exist. Developers use it to store code, track bugs through issues, propose changes through pull requests, run tests and deployment through GitHub actions, while also functioning as a social network and resume for developers. All duct taped to a Git server, which is exactly why it breaking is such a problem. And the main reason developers are big mad at GitHub right now is uptime or lack thereof. But let's check the actual receipts. According to third-party monitoring, GitHub uptime in 2025 dipped below 90% and April 2026 is tracking around an abysmal 86%. For context, AWS S3 promises 11 9s and GitHub is currently operating at just one 9. However, the official GitHub status page would beg to differ and reports uptime well above 99% for all services. Regardless, the previous week on GitHub was a disaster. On April 23rd, the merge queue quietly unmerged 2,092 pull requests across 658 repos. In other words, the platform whose entire job is to not lose your code just lost your code. Damn it, gone. Then on April 27th, GitHub's elastic search subsystem was hit by a botnet that took down GitHub search for hours. And then on April 28th, GitHub was forced to publish two blog posts the same morning. One was the CTO apologizing for reliability, while the other was about a critical remote code execution vulnerability where a git push could literally execute code on GitHub servers. A few big projects like Zig have already migrated away from GitHub, but then really hit the fan when Mitchell Hashimoto dropped this blog post. He's the creator of tools like Vagrant and Terraform, which are part of his company HashiCorp, which was taken public and made him extremely rich. Despite having enough money to own his own private jet, he still bangs out code daily building a terminal emulator called Ghosti. He joined GitHub in 2008 as user number 1,299 and has logged in almost every single day for 18 years. But on April 28th, he wrote a breakup letter while literally crying. Speaking of GitHub, he said, "I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software." That line hits hard and he says he kept a journal for a month and put an X next to every day a GitHub outage blocked his work and almost every day got an X. At this point he's had enough and his 50,000 star GitHub project Ghosti is leaving the platform for good. That's a massive vibe shift, but who can we get blame for this? Well, it's easy to point the finger at Microsoft because it's literally their sole responsibility to make this website work. But, I actually know people who work at GitHub and believe they're trying. The key to success is developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. When they acquired GitHub back in 2018, it actually got better in the years that followed with features like actions, code spaces, et cetera. But, now in the AI coding era, the enshittification is real. A GitHub CTO admits in writing that since 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply, which translated into English means that AI agents are hammering GitHub like it's a free buffet. A GitHub isn't just a host for developers anymore, it's a host for their replacements. In the same way Bill Gates saved the world from COVID-19, I have faith Microsoft will turn the GitHub ship around. But, if they don't, there are alternatives out there. You've got the reliable but boring GitLab, you've got the German nonprofit Codeberg, and you've got the minimal Sourcehut, which has zero AI features whatsoever, and many other viable platforms ready to reap the benefits of GitHub's downfall. So, that means the good news is that if you make the mistake of choosing to become a programmer as a career, there will always be a home for your code. But, did you realize you have 80,000 hours in your career? 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year for 40 years. That's a lot of time to make a positive impact on the world. And 80,000 Hours, the sponsor of today's video, can help you do that. If you're young, you've probably heard advice like follow your passion, do what you love, and take the initiative. But, these clichés are not based on evidence or data, unlike the work of 80,000 Hours, which is a nonprofit that for the last 10 years has been researching the question of how do you find a fulfilling career that does good, too. Their website has tons of collected research on high-impact careers, along with job boards, podcasts, and a lot more. It's an incredible resource for anyone looking to start a high-impact career or make a switch mid-career. Join the newsletter today to get a free copy of their in-depth career guide sent to your inbox. It could be the catalyst that changes your direction in life. This has been the Code Report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
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