By Tom Warren
Publication Date: 2026-05-21 16:00:00
When Microsoft announced it was acquiring GitHub in a $7.5 billion deal in 2018, developers were nervous. Some were concerned about Microsoft controlling GitHub, and others were taking a wait-and-see approach. Nearly eight years later, GitHub is now fighting for its survival, amid a surge of outages, security issues, and pressure from competitors.
In the last few weeks alone, GitHub had multiple major outages, a remote code execution vulnerability disclosure, and its internal code repositories hacked due to a “poisoned” VS Code extension on an employee’s device. I’ve spoken to current and former GitHub employees who all paint a picture of a company that is struggling with a lack of leadership and pressure from competitors.
A lot of GitHub’s current struggles can be traced back to last summer. Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke resigned and triggered a big shakeup to the way GitHub operates under Microsoft control. Microsoft didn’t replace Dohmke’s CEO position, so the rest…
