On April 28, 2026, the company that hosts nearly every serious software project on the planet posted a public apology for not being able to stay online.
GitHub's CTO, Vlad Fedorov, wrote a note titled "An update on GitHub availability." The closing line: "We hear the pain you're experiencing. We read every email, social post, support ticket, and we take it all to heart." Same morning, they also disclosed a critical security hole in their code-push pipeline. Rough day.
Here's the number that got people's attention. GitHub's official status page claimed about 99.79% uptime. An independent engineer named Marek Šuppa, who rebuilt the status tracking after GitHub stopped publishing aggregate numbers, measured 84.88% over the trailing 90 days. April came in under 85%.
The expected standard for a production service is 99.9%. So the platform everyone treats as bedrock was running roughly two orders of magnitude worse than the bar it set for the rest of us.
A separate tracker counted 257 incidents between May 2025 and April 2026, 48 of them major outages. That's about five incidents a week, every week, for a year. For context, 2024 logged 119. The jump is the story, not any single bad afternoon. (That 257 figure comes from one third-party tracker, not GitHub itself, so take it as "independently counted" rather than gospel.)
The cause, by GitHub's own account, was load from AI coding agents. Every automated agent in existence funnels into the same place. They planned to scale up 10x, then realized they needed 30x. The thing that made GitHub feel safe, that everybody uses it, is exactly what concentrated all that risk into one set of servers.
The person who walked away
The same day as the apology, a developer named Mitchell Hashimoto announced he was moving his terminal project, Ghostty, off GitHub.
This matters because of who he is. He's GitHub user number 1,299. Joined in February 2008. He's been opening that site nearly every working day for eighteen years. His line: "I want to code. And I can't code with GitHub anymore."
And here's the part I want you to sit with. He could leave.
Not easily, not overnight. He said the decision was months in the making and he still hasn't picked where he's going. But the door was open. Git, the technology underneath GitHub, is distributed by design. Every person who ever cloned that project has a complete copy of its full history on their own machine. The code was never trapped. GitHub was a convenient front door, not a vault holding the only key.
That's the whole lesson, and it has almost nothing to do with software developers.
Could you leave if you had to?
Most coverage treated the outages as the headline. I think the outages are the hook, and the real question is the one underneath: could you leave the platforms running your business if you needed to?
For most small businesses, creators, and agencies, the honest answer is no. And nobody chose that on purpose. It crept in one convenient decision at a time until "everybody uses it" quietly became the only reason anyone stays.
Your website, your store, your content, your customer list. If those live inside someone else's product, you're not betting on whether they have a good week. You're betting on that company's reliability and its goodwill, indefinitely, with no vote.
Goodwill is the part people skip. GitHub has had no CEO since August 2025. It got folded into its parent company's AI division, and its priorities are now its owner's priorities. None of that was up to the people who depend on it. When you build your livelihood on a rented platform, its roadmap becomes your roadmap whether you like where it's going or not.
Three questions worth answering before you need to
You don't need to migrate anything today. You just need to know where you actually stand. Three questions tell you most of it.
Do you own your domain? This is the cheapest one to fix and the one people get wrong most often. If a platform or an agency registered your domain under their account instead of yours, you don't control your own name on the internet. Go check who the registrant is. If it isn't you, fix that this week.
Is your content in a form you can take with you? A lot of platforms let you export "basic data" and then quietly require their paid migration service for the rest. Your posts, your product catalog, your email list. If you walked out tomorrow, what comes with you and what stays behind?
Do you know what leaving would cost? It's rarely the monthly fee. It's years of search ranking built on one domain, the rebuild from scratch, the downtime in between. The agencies I talk to say clients who want to move almost always have to rebuild the whole thing. People stay locked in not because the platform is great, but because the exit got too expensive while they weren't looking.
There's a clean way to think about this. Healthy platforms keep you by being good. Risky ones keep you because leaving would hurt. One is retention through value. The other is retention through friction. You want to be somewhere that earns the next month, not somewhere you can't afford to quit.
"Default" was never "safe"
Renting isn't evil. If you're testing an idea or you need to move fast this quarter, a rented platform is the right call. We use plenty of them ourselves. The point was never "go self-host everything" or "live in fear of an outage."
The point is to use these tools with your eyes open and an exit you actually understand. The projects that handled GitHub's bad year best weren't the ones with the most uptime. They were the ones that could leave.
"Industry default" only ever meant everyone shares the same point of failure. It never meant safe. Those are two different words, and a lot of businesses are about to learn the difference the hard way.
We're Kief Studio. Not an agency, not a consultant, your tech team. We build the kind of web presence you own outright. Your domain, your content, your data, in your name, so the answer to "could you leave?" is always yes.
If you're not sure where your business actually stands on that, the first conversation is free. Subscribe for free at kief.studio and we'll send over the resources that walk you through it.