A developer named Mitchell Hashimoto - the person who built Vagrant, one of the most widely used developer tools in the world, and who has been a GitHub user since 2008 - announced this week that his project Ghostty is leaving GitHub entirely.
His reason: he kept a daily journal for an entire month, marking each day GitHub had an outage that blocked his work. Almost every day got a mark.
"This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day," he wrote.
You might not know what Ghostty is. It doesn't matter. What matters is the question this raises for any small business that depends on any platform - and right now, most of them do.
The real story isn't GitHub
GitHub is a tool for software developers. Unless you have developers on your team, you're probably not using it directly.
But you are using something like it.
You're running your entire customer communication through one email platform. Your scheduling runs through one calendar app. Your inventory lives in one spreadsheet connected to one cloud storage provider. Your customer data lives in one CRM that you pay $149 a month for.
Every single one of those platforms has had an outage this year. Probably several.
The question Hashimoto's story raises isn't "should I leave GitHub?" It's: what happens to your business for every hour your critical tool is down?
The math most owners don't do
Let's say your point-of-sale system goes down during a busy Saturday. You can't process cards. Customers leave. You lose, conservatively, $400 an hour.
Two hours of downtime - which is not unusual for any cloud-based system - costs you $800 you will never get back.
Most platforms offer 99.9% uptime as a guarantee. That sounds good. But 99.9% uptime still means 8.7 hours of downtime per year. And that 8.7 hours almost never happens at 3 AM on a Tuesday. It happens when you need the system most.
The platform Hashimoto documented had multiple outages in a single month. His journal showed it.
What small business owners can actually do about this
This isn't a "move off your platform" argument. Switching everything is expensive, time-consuming, and often trades one set of problems for another.
It's a "know your backup" argument.
For every critical tool you use, answer these three questions:
- If this goes down right now, what can I do manually while I wait?
- Does my team know the manual process, or only the digital one?
- Is my data backed up somewhere I control, or only inside the platform?
The third question is the most important. Platforms that go down sometimes also get acquired, change pricing, or shut down entirely. If your customer data only lives inside one tool and that tool disappears, you have a much bigger problem than a few hours of downtime.
The tools most likely to cause problems if they go dark
Based on what I see small businesses relying on most heavily right now:
- Scheduling and booking tools - If customers can't book, they find someone else.
- Payment processors - A Stripe outage during peak hours is a direct revenue hit.
- Email marketing platforms - Less urgent in the moment, but a campaign stuck in limbo during a launch is real money.
- Cloud storage - If your team can't access shared files, work stops.
- CRM / customer database - The hardest to recover from if data is lost.
The fix isn't to stop using these tools. The fix is to export your data regularly, have a manual backup for your most critical function, and make sure your team isn't 100% helpless if the screen goes dark for two hours.
What Hashimoto is actually doing
He's moving to a different hosting platform - still figuring out which one. He's keeping a read-only mirror on GitHub so old links don't break. He's doing it incrementally so nothing falls apart during the transition.
That's a reasonable model for any business rethinking a tool dependency. You don't have to rip it out. You just have to make sure you're not trapped.
Source: Mitchell Hashimoto, "Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub," mitchellh.com, April 28, 2026. Hacker News discussion: item 47939579, 764 comments.