Mitchell Hashimoto Says Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub After 18 Years (April 28, 2026)

Mitchell Hashimoto, creator of the Ghostty terminal emulator and co-founder of HashiCorp, announced on April 28, 2026 that Ghostty will be leaving GitHub after 18 years. The decision comes one day after the largest GitHub outage of 2026 — an Elasticsearch cluster failure on April 27 that knocked issues, pull requests, and Actions offline for hours.

What Happened

In a personal blog post titled "Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub," Hashimoto wrote that he is GitHub user 1299, joined in February 2008, and has visited the site multiple times a day for over 18 years — "over half my life." He said he has been keeping a journal for the past month, marking an X next to every date a GitHub outage blocked his work, and that "almost every day has an X."

The trigger he names in the post is reliability: on the day he wrote it he was unable to do PR review for roughly two hours because of a GitHub Actions outage — explicitly not the same incident as the much larger April 27 Elasticsearch outage, but a separate failure a week earlier. "This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day," he wrote.

Hashimoto said the decision had been in the works for months and that he is in active discussions with multiple commercial and FOSS providers for Ghostty's new home. The team plans an incremental migration off GitHub-hosted issues, PRs, and Actions, and will keep a read-only mirror at the current github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty URL. His personal projects and other work will stay on GitHub for now.

Key Details

• April 27, 2026 outage — GitHub identified an overloaded Elasticsearch cluster as the source of intermittent failures viewing issues, pull requests, projects, and Actions workflow runs. Git operations and APIs were not impacted, and there was no data loss.
• Hashimoto's complaint is the surrounding infrastructure, not Git — in the post's footnotes he replies to the "Git is distributed!" crowd: "the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc."
• The blog post was written a week before publication — Hashimoto says the timing alongside the April 27 outage is coincidental; the final decision was made earlier in the week.
• Read-only mirror stays — the current github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty URL will continue to resolve so existing links, search engine results, and clones do not break.
• GitHub responded with an availability post — on April 27 GitHub Engineering published "An update on GitHub availability" acknowledging recent outages and outlining what it has done and is still doing to improve reliability.

What Developers Are Saying

The Hacker News thread for the announcement (item 47939579) sat at the top of the front page for most of April 28, with hundreds of comments. The conversation split between developers who said they had been waiting for someone with Hashimoto's profile to publicly call out GitHub's reliability problems, and others who argued that distributed Git workflows on Codeberg, Forgejo, GitLab, or sourcehut have been viable for years and that name-recognition migrations are overdue. Hashimoto himself replied in a comment that he "actually cried writing this" and described an "unhealthy relationship" with the platform.

On X, the announcement post crossed thousands of reposts within hours, drawing reactions from former HashiCorp colleagues and other prominent open-source maintainers. Several called out that the April 27 incident was the second large GitHub outage in roughly a week, after the April 23 issues-and-PRs incident.

What This Means for Developers

For now, nothing breaks. Ghostty's GitHub URL will keep working as a read-only mirror, and the project will move issues, pull-request review, and CI "as incrementally as possible" over the coming months. But for the wider ecosystem, this is the highest-profile project to publicly leave GitHub citing reliability — not licensing, governance, or Microsoft ownership — as the reason. Maintainers of projects that have been quietly evaluating Codeberg, GitLab, sourcehut, or self-hosted Forgejo now have a much more visible precedent to point at when proposing a move.

Teams that depend on GitHub Actions for production deploys should also note that Hashimoto's specific blocker was Actions, which has had multiple multi-hour incidents in 2026. Reviewing your CI escape hatch — whether a self-hosted runner, a parallel GitLab CI pipeline, or a CircleCI fallback — is a reasonable response.

What's Next

Hashimoto says he will share Ghostty's new home "in the coming months" once the team finalises a provider. Watch ghostty.org and mitchellh.com for the announcement. GitHub's own response — beyond the April 27 availability post — will be tested by whether it can ship visible reliability fixes before more flagship projects follow Ghostty out.

Sources

• Mitchell Hashimoto — "Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub" — primary source, the announcement post.
• The GitHub Blog — "An update on GitHub availability" — GitHub's official acknowledgement of the recent outage pattern.
• Hacker News discussion (47939579) — community reaction including comments from Hashimoto.
• InfoQ — "GitHub Acknowledges Recent Outages, Cites Scaling Challenges and Architectural Weaknesses".
• @mitchellh on X — the original social-media announcement.
• StatusGator — GitHub outage on April 23, 2026 — context on the broader 2026 incident pattern.