Remember back in 2018 when Microsoft announced it was buying GitHub for a cool $7.5 billion and every developer on the planet collectively clutched their keyboards in panic? Some fled to GitLab. Others nervously stayed put. Most just... watched and waited.
Well, the verdict is in - and it is not pretty.
Everything hitting the fan at once
According to a report from The Verge, GitHub is currently fighting what can only be described as a multi-front war against its own reliability. In just the last few weeks, the platform has suffered multiple major outages, disclosed a remote code execution vulnerability (the kind that makes security people go pale), and had its internal code repositories compromised. That is a genuinely rough stretch for any platform, let alone one that essentially holds the world's software infrastructure hostage.
To put this in perspective: GitHub is not just where developers store side projects and half-finished todo apps. It is the backbone of how software gets built, reviewed, and shipped globally. When GitHub wobbles, a huge chunk of the tech industry wobbles with it.
The wait-and-see crowd is starting to see
The original developer anxiety about Microsoft taking over was never really about Microsoft being evil. It was about what happens when a massive corporation absorbs a beloved tool that a community had built its entire workflow around. For years, the acquisition looked like a rare corporate success story. GitHub kept growing, Copilot launched and became a genuine AI coding assistant people actually used, and the doom-and-gloom crowd looked a bit silly.
Now though? The cracks are showing - and the timing could not be worse. Competitors have gotten sharper. GitLab has matured significantly. Newer platforms are circling. And every outage is a gentle nudge reminding developers that maybe, just maybe, they should think about where all their code actually lives.
The stakes are higher than your git push
What makes this genuinely interesting - beyond the schadenfreude of watching a $7.5 billion acquisition sweat a little - is what it means for the broader ecosystem. Microsoft has spent years rebuilding its reputation with developers. GitHub was a huge part of that story. If the platform continues to struggle with stability and trust, that reputation takes a hit too.
Nobody wants GitHub to fail. A destabilized GitHub is bad for basically everyone who writes software. But a little competition-induced urgency? That might actually be exactly what the platform needs right now.
Either way, the developers who moved to GitLab in 2018 are definitely feeling smug this week. Let them have it.
