Microsoft’s ability to acquire successful companies and then destroy them should be studied. Today we talk GitHub.
Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 For $7.5 billion in stock, and it’s already met with great skepticism in the community.
Github’s crazy outages are memorable, albeit with real consequences
GitHub outages after Microsoft acquisition 🤣 pic.twitter.com/ggXmw9M84kApril 25, 2026
The most notable sign of GitHub’s downward trajectory in recent times revolves around the stability of the platform.
GitHub own blog details how the platform failed to meet its service level agreements (SLAs), but one of the platform’s most legendary contributors is holding back on his calculations. Ghostty developer Mitchell Hashimoto started keeping a journal daily GitHub issues that prevent it from working. Tracking it shows a pretty dismal 90.21% uptime, well below GitHub’s 99.9% SLA.
There were other problems and bugs, with codes mysteriously disappearing into the void. GitHub CCO Kyle Daigle reached out to angry customers last week to explain the situation, but users didn’t believe it.
Kyle, I’ve been using GitHub since the beginning. Actually, I was one of the beta users. I wish GitHub would slow down and focus on reliability. Events must be really rare, not something that happens more often. If that means rolling back AI features, then…April 25, 2026
Ghostty is a very popular terminal emulator that has been developed through GitHub for nearly two decades. The emulator is known for its performance-first design and was a GitHub staple for many years until last week.
In a great post that is now somewhat viral, Ghostty developer Mitchell Hashimoto has announced that he is leaving the platform. This became a visible inflection point for the platform. This prompted an apology from GitHub’s CCO in response, who said: “I’m sorry. The team will continue to work on making something you can come back to GitHub with real evidence.”
Sorry, @mitchellh. The team will continue to work on making GitHub something you can come back to with real evidence, not words. Until then, I’ll still welcome Ghostty as a user.April 28, 2026
In a blog post, Hashimoto expressed frustration and grief over the platform he had dedicated “half his life to”.
“Lately, I’ve been very vocally critical of GitHub. I’ve been brutal about it. I’ve been angry about it. I’ve hurt people’s feelings. Hashimoto explained. “GitHub fails me every day, and it’s personal. It’s irrationally personal. I love GitHub more than anyone loves anything, and I’m angry about it. I’m sorry for the hurt feelings of the people who work on it.”
I’ve felt this way for a long time, but for the past month I’ve been keeping a journal where I’ve put an “X” next to every date that a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my performance. There is an X almost every day. On the day I wrote this post, I was unable to review any PRs for ~2 hours due to an outage in GitHub Actions. It’s no longer a serious workplace if it blocks you for hours every day, every day.”
Hashimoto’s departure isn’t the only major player leaving the scene either. Future programming language Zig as well announced he moved to rival Codeberg last year and calls GitHub’s engineering culture “rotten.”
“Priorities and engineering culture have decayed, leaving users with a kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework in the name of progress. What used to be fast is now slow and often completely broken.”
Github’s downward trajectory continues to undermine Nadella’s pillars of Microsoft.
Why does this happen? As it relates to Xbox and Windows, it seems… you guessed it! Artificial intelligence.
Microsoft’s investment infrastructure revolves entirely around the pursuit of artificial intelligence, with big internal fears that Microsoft might miss the boat on another big computing paradigm shift — like it did with smartphones in decades past.
Microsoft is investing heavily in AI workflows and is effectively moving GitHub as an entity closer to its CoreAI division.
Microsoft’s increasing focus, infrastructure and code Underwritten by hallucinatory AI platforms, Microsoft is chasing AI investor hype at the expense of quality and customers.
Indeed, Xbox recently issued an apology for the state of the platform in recent weeks. Windows 11 also promises a renewed focus on feedback and quality. Hell, even Microsoft’s World of Warcraft is full of bugs and lately server issues.
In my opinion, all this cannot be a coincidence. If there is something that comes to define Satya NadellaHis tenure at Microsoft is as follows: the quality has deteriorated.
Is it time for Microsoft to reinvest its profits back into its business? Maybe I’m misremembering, but one thing’s for sure: all that cash going into AI platforms is doing more than ever in Microsoft’s core services. And more than ever, it seems completely unsustainable.
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