Summary
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Frequent GitHub outages disrupt work, occur almost daily and block schedules.
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A long-time GitHub user and creator of Ghostty will move major projects off GitHub.
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Personal projects remain on GitHub, but the developer will not host critical work there at this time.
GitHub hasn’t made any friends lately with its stability issues. Everyone from small hobbyists to large corporations have been facing GitHub reliability issues lately, to the point where OpenAI reportedly thought about creating its own variant just to be able to ensure it had access to its own code at all times.
Unfortunately, GitHub’s recent issues have caused it to lose a valuable member. Not only was this member the 1299th person to create an account for GitHub in 2008, but he also used it to develop and release his excellent terminal software, Ghostty. And while they loved spending time with the service, they have since declared their intention to leave GitHub, and we’re not sure where that goes next.
The FOSS community created its own MinIO fork after the original was made read-only
Good speed.
Ghostty leaves GitHub for greener pastures
Or at least, pastures that don’t experience excruciating downtime
The developer in question is Mitchell Hashimoto, who wrote about his feelings about GitHub on his blog. They begin by sharing fond memories of the website, saying they opened GitHub “Every day, multiple times a day, for over 18 years.” They say that GitHub is where they are happiest, and that they were “scrolling through GitHub issues since before it was just a word.”
Unfortunately, Hashimoto noticed that GitHub’s stability has been pretty bad lately, and they have the log to prove it:
I’ve felt this way for a long time, but over the last month I’ve been keeping a journal where I put an “X” next to each date that a GitHub outage negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an It’s no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you for hours a day, every day.
While Hashimoto says he’s open to returning if GitHub gets its act together, they plan to move Ghostty to another platform. All their personal projects will stay on GitHub, but the big projects will migrate elsewhere. As for where Ghostty will be housed next, even Hashimoto says they don’t know yet, but it will be interesting to see where they settle down.