Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub (4 minute read)
Mitchell Hashimoto is moving Ghostty off GitHub after 18 years on the platform due to near-daily outages that prevent him from working for hours at a time.
What: Ghostty, an open source terminal emulator created by Mitchell Hashimoto, is leaving GitHub for another hosting provider after frequent outages made the platform unreliable for development work.
Why it matters: This signals a potential shift in GitHub's reliability reputation among high-profile developers and raises questions about centralization in developer infrastructure when platform outages can block thousands of developers from shipping code daily.
Takeaway: If you maintain critical projects on GitHub, consider documenting outage impacts and having a contingency plan for repository hosting.
Deep dive
- Mitchell Hashimoto, an 18-year GitHub veteran (user #1299 since 2008), is migrating Ghostty off the platform due to reliability issues
- He tracked outages in a journal for a month and found GitHub failures impacted his work nearly every single day
- The final straw came when GitHub Actions outages prevented PR reviews for hours, making the platform unsuitable for "serious work"
- Despite his deep emotional attachment to GitHub (he started Vagrant partly hoping to get hired there), the platform's unreliability has become untenable
- He acknowledges being publicly critical and "lashing out" at GitHub, hurting feelings of people working on it, but frames it as frustration from someone who "loves GitHub more than a person should love a thing"
- The migration plan is incremental and has been in development for months, predating the major April 27, 2026 outage
- A read-only GitHub mirror will remain at the current URL to maintain discoverability
- Only Ghostty is moving for now (where the impact is greatest on maintainers and community), with personal projects staying on GitHub
- The issue isn't Git's distributed nature but the centralized infrastructure around it: issue tracking, pull requests, and CI/CD automation
- The decision represents a significant vote of no-confidence in GitHub from a high-profile developer whose career has been intertwined with the platform
Original article
GitHub outages have gotten so common that they are negatively impacting developers' ability to work.