Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub — Persistent Outages Push a Beloved OSS Project Away After 18 Years
Mitchell Hashimoto, GitHub user #1299 and creator of Ghostty terminal, announced the project is leaving GitHub due to daily infrastructure outages affecting issues, PRs, and GitHub Actions. The post sparked 1,400+ HN points and a broader conversation about GitHub's reliability for serious open-source work.
Original sourceMitchell Hashimoto doesn't make dramatic announcements lightly. He's GitHub user #1299 — he joined in February 2008, has opened the site almost every day for over 18 years, and describes it as the place he's been "most happy" as a developer. Which is exactly why his announcement that Ghostty is leaving GitHub lands as hard as it does.
The reason is simple and operational: GitHub has been down nearly every day for the past month. Not Git — GitHub. Issues, pull requests, GitHub Actions — the collaboration and automation layer that modern open-source projects run on. "This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day," Hashimoto wrote. "I want to code. And I can't code with GitHub anymore."
Ghostty, his GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Zig, has become one of the most-watched open-source projects of 2025-2026 — with a large, active contributor community that depends on reliable issue tracking and CI/CD. Persistent outages aren't just inconvenient; they're an existential problem for a project at that scale.
The destination isn't decided yet. Hashimoto says he's in discussions with multiple providers — both commercial and open-source alternatives — and will share details in coming months. A read-only mirror will remain at the current GitHub URL during the transition. His other personal projects will stay on GitHub for now, making this a selective migration rather than a full break.
The community reaction on Hacker News was substantial — 1,400+ points, hundreds of comments, and a flood of "I've been having the same issues" from other maintainers. Whether this becomes a broader exodus or stays an isolated case, it's a credibility problem GitHub can't afford to ignore.
Panel Takes
The Builder
Developer Perspective
“The CI/CD reliability complaints are real — I've had Actions queues stall for hours on no fewer than three occasions this month. When your deployment pipeline is blocked by the platform, you start seriously questioning platform lock-in. Hashimoto is just the first high-profile name to act on it.”
The Skeptic
Reality Check
“GitHub hosts over 400 million repositories. One high-profile maintainer's frustration shouldn't be read as a systemic failure. The grass-is-greener problem is real — GitLab, Forgejo, and self-hosted alternatives come with their own reliability and discovery trade-offs that Hashimoto will find out about eventually.”
The Futurist
Big Picture
“GitHub's dominance has always been about network effects, not technical superiority. If reliability concerns start outweighing those network effects for enough high-profile projects, the platform monoculture cracks. Forgejo and ActivityPub-based alternatives are waiting — this is exactly the catalyst they need.”