"GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal": After Xbox and Windows, now GITHUB is in crisis — Microsoft, what are you doing?

Microsoft's ability to acquire successful companies and then destroy them needs to be studied. Today, we're talking about GitHub.

Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for a hard $7.5 billion in stock, and it was already met with huge amounts of skepticism from the community.

GitHub remains the largest source code hosting platform in the world. Software companies of all shapes and sizes depend on the platform, from hyperscalers to hobbyists, and it arguably changed the way open source software became distributed online.

GitHub's independent, open-source nature seemed at odds with the cold corporatism of Microsoft, and users were immediately concerned that Microsoft would ruin the platform over time. As we approach the acquisition's 10-year mark, those users are increasingly looking like they might've been on the money.

Github's maddening outages are becoming memeworthy, albeit with real consequences

In recent times, the most noteworthy sign of GitHub's downward trajectory revolves around platform stability.

GitHub's own blog has been detailing how the platform is failing to meet its own service level agreements (SLA), but one of the platform's most legendary contributors has been keeping their own tally. Ghostty developer Mitchell Hashimoto began keeping a journal of everyday GitHub issues that prevented him from working. His tracking showcases a pretty dismal 90.21% uptime, far below GitHub's stated SLA of 99.9%.

There have been other issues and bugs, too, with code commits mysteriously vanishing into the void. GitHub CCO Kyle Daigle addressed angry customers last week to explain the situation, but users aren't convinced.

Ghostty is a very popular terminal emulator, developed via GitHub for almost two decades. The emulator is renowned for its performance-first design and has been a staple of GitHub for many years, until this past week.

In a large post that has now gone somewhat viral, Ghostty developer Mitchell Hashimoto announced he's leaving the platform. It has become something of a visible inflection point for the platform. It prompted a groveling apology from GitHub's CCO in response, who said, "I'm sorry. The team is going to keep working to make GitHub something you can come back to with real proof."

In his blog post, Hashimoto expressed frustration and lamentation for the platform he'd dedicated "half of his life" to.

"Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub. I've been mean about it. I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out," Hashimoto explained. "GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal. I love GitHub more than a person should love a thing, and I'm mad at it. I'm sorry about the hurt feelings to the people working on it."

I've felt this way for a long time, but for the past month I've kept a journal where I put an "X" next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day."

Hashimoto's departure isn't the only major player to exit stage left, either. Upcoming programming language Zig also announced it is migrating to competitor Codeberg last year, calling GitHub's engineering culture "rotted."

"Priorities and the engineering culture have rotted, leaving users inflicted with some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework in the name of progress. Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken."

Github's downward trajectory continues Nadella's streak of screwing up core Microsoft pillars

Why is this happening? Much like with Xbox and Windows, it seems to be related to ... you guessed it! Artificial Intelligence.

Microsoft's investment infrastructure revolves entirely around chasing artificial intelligence of late, with vast internal fears that Microsoft may miss the boat on another major computing paradigm shift — as it did with smartphones in decades past.

Microsoft has been investing mammoth amounts of capital into AI workflows, and has, in fact, been migrating GitHub as an entity more closely to its CoreAI division.

With more and more of Microsoft's attention, infrastructure, and code being written by hallucination-prone artificial intelligence platforms, Microsoft seems to be chasing AI investor hype at the cost of quality and customers.

Indeed, Xbox has recently posted groveling apologies for the state of the platform in recent weeks. Windows 11 has as well, pledging to re-focus on feedback and quality. Hell, even Microsoft-owned World of Warcraft has been laden with bugs and server problems as of late.

This can't all be a coincidence, in my view. If there's one thing that has come to define Satya Nadella's tenure at Microsoft, it's this: degraded quality.

Was there ever a time when Microsoft would reinvest profits back into its business? Perhaps I'm misremembering, but one thing is for sure: sending all of the cash to artificial intelligence platforms seems to be doing a number on Microsoft's core services more than ever. And more than ever, it seems completely unsustainable.

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