Mitchell Hashimoto is pulling Ghostty off GitHub. The reason is daily outages.

Mitchell Hashimoto, the HashiCorp co-founder who maintains the Ghostty terminal emulator, announced on April 28 that the project is leaving GitHub. His complaint isn’t about pricing or AI training. It’s about availability. He’s been keeping a daily journal that marks an “X” against any workday GitHub outages blocked him from doing pull-request reviews. The journal, by his account, is mostly Xs.

The Hacker News thread crossed 2,180 points in 13 hours, which puts it on the very top of the front page. That kind of pile-on doesn’t happen unless a lot of other maintainers are sitting on the same gripes.

What he actually said

The post is short, and the load-bearing line is direct: “This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.” Hashimoto adds the personal layer below it: “It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn’t want me to be there.” The closing reads “After 18 years, I’ve got to go. I’d love to come back one day, but this will have to be predicated on real results and improvements, not words and promises.”

He stops short of naming a destination. The post says he’s in conversations with “multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS)” and will share specifics in the coming months. The existing GitHub repo will turn into a read-only mirror, which means PRs and issues land somewhere else but the canonical archive is still browsable from the URL people have bookmarked.

The trigger event he names is small. He couldn’t merge a PR because GitHub Actions was down for two hours on the day of the post. By itself that’s a footnote. As a recurring pattern across months, it’s a workflow problem.

GitHub has had a bad few months

The complaint isn’t out of nowhere. GitHub’s own availability update acknowledges a sequence of incidents in early 2026 that hit Actions, Pages, and the Codespaces platform. The post promises an SLA review and “deeper investments in resilience,” which is the kind of language site-reliability teams produce after a difficult quarter.

There’s been a separate bug-class problem on top of the uptime issues. Wiz’s CVE-2026-3854 disclosure on the same day as Hashimoto’s post documents a critical RCE in GitHub’s git push pipeline that, while patched within six hours of report, lingered on Enterprise Server installs. Ghostty isn’t an enterprise customer, but the optics of “infra has been unstable” plus “infra had a critical bug” land in the same week.

GitHub hasn’t responded publicly to Hashimoto. It’s an awkward thread to address: the complaint is reputational rather than billing-related, the customer is a high-profile maintainer, and the proposed fix is “be more reliable,” which is what every infra team is already trying to do.

Where projects actually go when they leave

The realistic options for a project the size of Ghostty are smaller than they were five years ago. GitLab’s hosted product is the obvious commercial alternative; Codeberg and SourceHut cover the FOSS side. Self-hosted Gitea and Forgejo are technically possible but push the maintenance burden onto the project. None of these match GitHub’s social graph for discovery, which is the part nobody has solved.

Hashimoto’s read-only-mirror commitment is the practical concession. The project keeps its existing star count, keeps its issue history searchable, and keeps the URL working for anyone who already linked to it. New contributions route through whatever the new home turns out to be. That’s the same compromise MinIO made when it archived its main repo last week.

The other interesting backdrop is Warp open-sourcing its terminal on the same day. Warp’s bet is that going onto GitHub gives it the social graph and contribution flow it needs to compete with Cursor and Codex. Hashimoto’s bet, with a project that’s already established, is that he doesn’t need that social graph anymore. Both can be right at the same time.

What this means for you

If you’re a Ghostty contributor, nothing breaks today. The mirror keeps your bookmarks, your stars, and your existing issues. Watch the project’s website for the destination announcement and the migration window, which the post implies will land within a few months.

If you’re a maintainer of a smaller project who’s been on the fence about an exit, this is a useful data point but not a green light. Hashimoto can leave because Ghostty is established and his name carries it. A project under 1,000 stars that pulls the same move loses its discovery surface overnight. The honest read here: GitHub has uptime work to do and a real reputation problem with maintainers, and the next few quarterly status posts will tell us whether the platform recovers or whether more high-signal projects walk.