GitHub is experiencing an unprecedented major collapse.
Recently, the global open-source tech community witnessed a shocking rift.
Mitchell Hashimoto, an 18-year veteran fan of GitHub and the famous developer of the Ghostty terminal, posted a sensational 'farewell letter' that went viral—every word bleeding with pain.
GitHub fails me every day.
I wish it were better, but I want to program more. I can no longer program using GitHub. I'm sorry, after 18 years, I have to go.
If a platform locks you out for hours every day, it is no longer suitable for serious work.
Subsequently, Ghostty packed up all its assets and decisively left.
His departure is just the tip of the iceberg in an avalanche.
GitHub's Life or Death
In recent months, giants like Citibank and Intel have expressed dissatisfaction to Microsoft over GitHub's ongoing failures. Even OpenAI has begun exploring self-built solutions.
To appease customers, Microsoft had to issue a large number of Credits to enterprise users as compensation for losses, leading directly to a bleeding of profits.
The most severe incident occurred last month: a mistakenly triggered, unreleased feature on GitHub caused numerous repositories to 'roll back,' with recent code modifications disappearing directly. Many enterprises have been forced to migrate.
Nearly eight years ago, when Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion, global programmers were filled with concern.
As expected, after a brief golden period, this 'programmer's sanctuary'—hosting over 1.5 billion developers and 10 billion code repositories worldwide—now stands at a critical juncture of life or death in an extremely brutal manner.
3800+ Repositories 'Wiped Out' by Hackers
Even more serious, a recent security storm has completely stripped GitHub bare.
On May 21, 2026, a message instantly exploded on the hacker forum BreachForums: a hacker group openly offered GitHub's core source code for sale at a mere $50,000!
They arrogantly wrote:
Everything of the main platform is here. I would be happy to send samples to interested buyers for verification. This is not blackmail; we are too lazy to extort GitHub. If one person buys, we will completely destroy the data. If no buyer is found, we will soon make it public for free.
Subsequently, GitHub officially reluctantly confirmed: over 3,800 internal code repositories were indeed compromised.
The origin of this disaster is absurdly unbelievable: a GitHub internal developer installed a malicious, poisoned VS Code extension plugin on their work device. After credentials were leaked, over 3,800 repositories were breached.
VS Code and GitHub, both belonging to Microsoft, should have been a 'family ecosystem combination.' However, VS Code plugins lack high-intensity review mechanisms, making them the perfect entry point for hackers.
Because VS Code frequently prompts developers to install various plugins, these 'Trojan horses' can freely access local files, system terminals, etc.
When the GitHub engineer downloaded the malicious plugin, their long-term valid personal access token was instantly intercepted by the hackers!
For a platform built on 'code security and hosting,' having its source code publicly offered for sale is undoubtedly a resounding slap in the face.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
In March of this year, security agencies discovered a 0-day-level critical vulnerability in GitHub's internal Git infrastructure.
If exploited, attackers could directly and unlimitedly access millions of public and private code repositories across the entire network, with consequences a hundred times more terrifying than this incident!
Management Shake-up: No More CEO, Reduced to a Microsoft Vassal
Behind the frequent security and technical incidents is GitHub's internal 'leaderless state' for nearly a year.
Last summer, the beloved former CEO Thomas Dohmke suddenly resigned. Microsoft then made a decision that shocked all employees: completely abolish the GitHub CEO position.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke
Dohmke thanked everyone: 'GitHub has never been stronger, with over 1 billion repositories and branches, and over 1.5 billion developers. It is thanks to your relentless efforts that GitHub Copilot has brought the biggest transformation in software development since the advent of the PC.'
For seven years, GitHub proudly maintained its status as an 'independent subsidiary.' But last summer, it was merged into the newly formed CoreAI team.
This drastic change directly pushed GitHub executives into an awkward position: they lost their direct line of communication with Microsoft's top leadership and were forced to report to Parikh, the head of the CoreAI team and former Meta executive.
However, Parikh is extremely unpopular internally. It was he who insisted on erasing the GitHub CEO position.
'There's basically no GitHub here anymore; it's now completely a department of Microsoft,' one senior employee angrily stated. 'Management and technical talent are fleeing madly.'
This was followed by a loss of top talent: former CEO Dohmke founded the next-generation developer platform Entire, poaching 11 people; 34-year veteran Julia Liuson resigned; Senior Vice President of Product Engineering Jared Palmer transferred to the Xbox team; the Chief Revenue Officer resigned.
Current CTO Vladimir Fedorov aggressively promoted the project to migrate GitHub to Azure servers. This complex MySQL cluster relocation directly caused the chain of outages over the past year.
Thus, GitHub's R&D, finance, and marketing have been comprehensively strangled and devoured. Internally, there is division and discord, with the loss of technical backbone.
GitHub's once-proud 'pure developer culture' is being gnawed away by Microsoft's bureaucratic and powerful system!
Moat Breached: Cursor and Claude Code's Dimensional Reduction Strike
The external outages and internal turmoil have torn open huge cracks for predators.
Once, Copilot was almost synonymous with AI-assisted programming.
However, in 2024, Cursor emerged out of nowhere. While GitHub Copilot was still stuck in the 'you write a line, I guess the next line' code completion stage, Cursor could already understand the entire project context and generate entire modules with one click.
In 2025, Claude Code launched a dimensional reduction strike—it could not only write code but also automate complex debugging, testing, and multi-file collaborative modifications.
Microsoft was thrown into unprecedented panic internally. According to leaks, Jay Parikh warned with an ashen face in a meeting: GitHub is facing a 'death threat.'
Parikh's core fear is: once developers get used to completing all development in Cursor, they will no longer upload their code to GitHub.
To this end, Microsoft seriously evaluated acquiring Cursor but hesitated for a moment. In the blink of an eye, Cursor was snapped up by SpaceX.
What's even more amusing is that Claude Code is so incredibly good that tens of thousands of engineers in Microsoft's Windows and Office departments have all become die-hard fans of CC. Microsoft executives were completely broken!
Rajesh Jha issued a strict order to all staff, forcibly revoking all CC licenses by the end of June and forcing engineers to revert to using GitHub Copilot CLI.
Financial Avalanche: The 'Subsidy Black Hole' of Making More Money, Losing More Money
Moreover, GitHub's commercial operations are also deeply mired, even starting to backfire on Microsoft.
On the surface, GitHub's data still looks impressive. By the end of 2025, Copilot paid users surpassed 4.7 million, and GitHub's annual recurring revenue crossed the $3 billion threshold.
But behind the pretty numbers, it's all Microsoft's blood.
With the AI explosion, GitHub traffic surged 14 times. However, AI features for code hosting and open-source projects remain completely free.
Meanwhile, the inference costs for running AI models remain high. The computing power consumed by heavy users far exceeds the $10 monthly subscription fee—the more they sell, the more they lose.
During Microsoft's earnings call in April this year, the CFO rarely admitted: the significant increase in GitHub Copilot usage directly lowered the gross margin of the entire core cloud business.
Under pressure from Wall Street, GitHub announced last month: abolish the unlimited monthly usage model and fully transition to 'pay-as-you-go.' Once credits are depleted, AI services are immediately cut off.
This move, perceived as greedy, completely infuriated developers!
The global IT services giant NinjaOne immediately publicly stated: they are comprehensively guiding engineers to abandon GitHub and turn to the Claude Code ecosystem.
Will GitHub Die?
This year, Microsoft's stock price has fallen by over 10%, performing the worst among the 'Magnificent Seven' tech stocks.
Its developer ecosystem cornerstone, GitHub, is pushing everything toward the abyss.
To break free from dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic, CoreAI has ordered the comprehensive collection of all code to train Microsoft's own native large model.
This practice of recklessly depleting the ecosystem for its own benefit has completely chilled developers worldwide.
The trust of the open-source community, the neutral ecological environment, and the free, pure developer culture are rapidly vanishing from this $7.5 billion behemoth.
Now, the most fatal question facing Satya Nadella is: In the era of AI agents, do global developers still need a central code repository platform like GitHub?
If Microsoft cannot provide a convincing answer, it will lose the soul it has cultivated around its ecosystem for decades—
'Developers, developers, developers!'
References:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/935250/microsoft-github-struggles-notepadhttps://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-leaving-githubhttps://www.wired.com/story/teampcp-software-supply-chain-attack-spree-github/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
This article comes from the WeChat public account "Xinzhiyuan," author: ASI Revelation.
