GitHub is having some major issues right now…

Fireship| 00:05:58|Apr 30, 2026

Chapters7

An overview of ongoing GitHub outages and the impact on developers who rely on the service for code hosting, workflows, and collaboration.

Fireship explains GitHub’s outages, the Mitchell Hashimoto breakup, and how AI, outages, and competitors are reshaping where developers store code.

Summary

Fireship’s code report dives into the recent GitHub turmoil, explaining why uptime matters when the platform doubles as code host, CI, and social profile. The video traces GitHub’s history from its Rails beginnings to its $7.5B acquisition by Microsoft, then highlights a rough 2025–2026 run with reported downtimes, search outages, and a notorious remote code execution disclosure. Fireship notes that third‑party monitors pegged uptime around 86% in April 2026, while GitHub’s own status page claims high availability, illustrating the disconnect. The segment also chronicles concrete events: the Merge Queue unmerging 292 PRs across 658 repos, a botnet hitting Elasticsearch, and two blog posts on reliability and a critical security flaw on April 28. The video foregrounds Mitchell Hashimoto’s decision to abandon GitHub for his Ghosty project, framing it as a symbolic blow to a platform seen as essential to modern software projects. Finally, Fireship surveys alternatives like GitLab, Codeberg, and Sourcehut, and ends by promoting 80,000 Hours as a resource for career impact. It’s a rapid, opinionated tour of why developers are frustrated today—and what could come next for the code hosting ecosystem.

Key Takeaways

GitHub’s uptime during April 2026 tracked around 86%, a sharp drop from ideal expectations and a contrast to the status page’s assurances.
A single botnet outage on April 27 hit GitHub’s Elasticsearch service, temporarily crippling search across the platform.
On April 23, the Merge Queue unmerged 292 pull requests across 658 repositories, illustrating a tangible impact of outages on code activity.
Mitchell Hashimoto’s Ghosty project left GitHub after 18 years of daily use, with a public breakup letter highlighting the platform’s current reliability frustrations.
GitHub’s AI-enabled development workflows are accelerating, contributing to pressure on the platform as agents and automation increasingly hammer the service.
Alternative hosting options (GitLab, Codeberg, Sourcehut) gain relevance as developers seek reliability and different feature trade-offs in response to GitHub’s outages.
The video frames the outages as a broader industry inflection point, suggesting that the “ship around GitHub” narrative could shift toward more diverse hosting and tooling ecosystems.

Who Is This For?

Software developers and DevOps engineers who rely on GitHub for code hosting, CI, and collaboration, plus tech leaders weighing platform risk and migration options.

Notable Quotes

"I want to ship software, and it doesn't want me to ship software."

—Hashimoto’s breakup quote highlights the emotional and practical impact of outages on a creator’s ability to deliver.

"The main reason developers are big mad at GitHub right now is uptime or lack thereof."

—Fireship sums up the core pain point driving the discourse around GitHub outages.

"A GitHub CTO admits in writing that since 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply."

—Notes the rising role of AI agents in hammering GitHub, framing the pressure from automation.

"On April 23rd, the Merge Queue quietly unmerged 292 pull requests across 658 repos."

—Concrete example of outages translating into lost or delayed code changes.

"Mitchell Hashimoto dropped this blog post. He’s leaving GitHub for good."

—Marks the symbolic moment that underscores wider dissatisfaction with GitHub’s reliability.

Questions This Video Answers

Why did GitHub outages spike in April 2026 and how did it affect developers?
What impact did Mitchell Hashimoto’s Ghosty project leaving GitHub have on the community?
What are viable alternatives to GitHub for hosting code and CI in 2026?
How reliable is GitHub’s status page compared to third-party uptime monitoring?
What role does AI play in development workflows on GitHub according to Fireship?

GitHub outagesGitHub uptime statisticsMitchell HashimotoGhostyGitHub ElasticsearchMerge QueueGitHub security advisoryCode hosting alternativesAI in development workflowsFireship

Full Transcript

It's 10 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 Ghosty 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're 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. It take the command line nightmare your senior engineer keeps yelling about it. Give it a web UI, make it like Facebook for code, and suddenly every developer on Earth has a public coding profile. It worked so well that by 2018, Microsoft bought it for $7.5 billion. 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 thirdparty monitoring, GitHub uptime in 2025 dipped below 90% and April 2026 is tracking around an abysmal 86%. For context, AWSS3 promises 11 9 and GitHub is currently operating at just 1 n. 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 Q quietly unmerged 292 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's 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 Git push could literally execute code on GitHub servers. A few big projects like Zigg 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 Hashi Corp, 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 Ghosty. He joined GitHub in 2008 as user number 1,299 and is 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, quote, "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 Ghosty is leaving the platform for good. That's a massive vibe shift, but who can we get blamed 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, etc. But now in the AI coding era, the initification 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 replacement. In the same way Bill Gates saved the world from CO 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 Source Hut, which has zero AI features whatsoever, and many other viable platforms ready to reap the benefits of GitHub's downfall. That 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 cliches 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. that this has been the code report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.