Ghostty Leaves GitHub After 18 Years of Daily Outages

Mitchell Hashimoto, GitHub user #1299, creator of Vagrant, and co-founder of HashiCorp, announced in April 2026 that Ghostty, his open-source terminal emulator, will leave GitHub. The announcement ends an 18-year daily GitHub streak that Hashimoto describes as central to his identity as a developer and a personally painful decision.

Why Near-Daily Outages Forced the Move

For the past month, Hashimoto kept a daily journal marking an "X" next to every day a GitHub outage negatively impacted his work. Almost every day has an X. On the day he wrote the post, a GitHub Actions outage had made PR review impossible for roughly two hours — and that was not an exceptional day.

The April 2026 ElasticSearch incident attracted public attention, but Hashimoto's decision predates that event. He documented weeks of sustained failures across Issues, Pull Requests, Actions CI/CD, and search. For a project like Ghostty with hundreds of contributors and GitHub Actions powering every release, these failures cascade directly into delayed releases and blocked contributions. Tracking the data for 30 days made the aggregate cost undeniable.

What GitHub Is vs. What Hashimoto Is Actually Leaving

The important framing is that Hashimoto is not leaving Git. Git is distributed and works fine regardless of what GitHub does. What he is abandoning is the platform layer that surrounds it: the PR workflow, the issue tracker, Actions CI/CD, notifications, and the operational reliability that modern open-source maintenance depends on. These platform services are what transform a git repository into a functioning project with an active community.

Hashimoto joined GitHub in February 2008 as user #1299. He started Vagrant, his first successful open-source project, partly hoping it would earn him a job there. He has opened GitHub daily for 18 years through breakups, college exams, and his honeymoon. His frustration comes directly from that investment. Leaving is not ideological; it is a practical response to a tool that blocks him from shipping software every day.

Where Ghostty Is Migrating

No final destination has been announced. Hashimoto is evaluating commercial hosting providers and open-source alternatives including GitLab, Codeberg, Forgejo, and self-hosted Gitea instances — all credible options at Ghostty's scale in 2026. The migration will be incremental rather than a sudden cutover, with issues, CI pipelines, contributor workflows, and release tooling moving separately.

A read-only mirror will stay at the current GitHub URL to preserve discoverability and give the contributor community time to update their tooling. His personal projects and other repositories remain on GitHub for now. Hashimoto has a migration plan but has not committed to a public timeline, which is appropriate given the complexity of moving a large active project mid-release-cycle.

What This Says About GitHub in 2026

The most significant part of Hashimoto's departure is not the frustration — plenty of developers are frustrated with GitHub. It is who is leaving and why. Hashimoto is user #1299, someone who loved the platform for two decades and built his career around it. His departure on reliability grounds alone signals that GitHub's network-effect lock-in has real limits.

Alternatives have matured significantly. GitLab's self-hosted version handles enterprise-scale projects. Codeberg and Forgejo have grown into functional open-source communities. Containerization has made running a private git forge affordable for a small team. When daily outages make even the most loyal users evaluate alternatives, those alternatives now look credible enough to actually choose. Hashimoto left the door open explicitly: he would return if GitHub delivers real infrastructure improvements. Whether that happens, and how many projects are quietly watching this migration before making their own decisions, is the more interesting question for GitHub's next chapter.

KEY POINTS:

- Ghostty creator Mitchell Hashimoto leaving GitHub after 18 years as daily user
- Nearly every workday in April 2026 marked by a GitHub outage blocking work
- GitHub Actions outage blocked all PR review for two hours on the day of writing
- Hashimoto is GitHub user #1299, joined February 2008, creator of Vagrant
- Migration targets include GitLab, Codeberg, Forgejo, and self-hosted Gitea
- Read-only GitHub mirror preserved; other personal projects remain on GitHub
- Alternative git forge platforms are viable in 2026 for projects at Ghostty's scale