GitHub’s Growing Pains

GitHub has experienced explosive user growth in recent years, particularly accelerating in 2025. The platform crossed 100 million developers in 2023 and reached over 180 million developers by late 2025, with more than 36 million new developers joining in 2025 alone—equating to roughly one new developer every second.

This rapid expansion, further amplified by AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot, has driven significant increases in activity: hundreds of millions of pull requests, nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (up 25% YoY), and surging repository creation and API usage.

Impact on Availability

This hyper-growth has strained GitHub’s infrastructure, leading to multiple high-impact outages and degraded performance in early-to-mid 2026. GitHub’s own engineering leadership has publicly acknowledged that rapid load growth, architectural coupling between services, and challenges in handling large-scale workloads (including monorepos and AI-driven automation) have caused cascading issues.

A Reddit user charted out the availability of GitHub over the last decade: near-perfect stability early on, then visibly higher volatility as scale and complexity grow—likely tracking the platform’s massive user growth and heavier real-time workloads. 

Source: Reddit r/github

The rapid pace of growth is starting to take its toll. New activations for Copilot Student, Pro, and Pro+ are temporarily on hold. 

Key incidents in early 2026 (e.g., February and March) affected core services such as Git operations, Pull Requests, Actions, Search, and the API, sometimes with failure rates reaching 40%+ for web requests during peaks.

Mitchell Hashimoto, the co-founder of HashiCorp and the creator of several foundational open-source DevOps and infrastructure tools, announced that Ghostty (his current major terminal emulator project that he has been developing as a passion project since around 2021) is leaving GitHub due to frequent outages disrupting git operations, CI runs, PR reviews, and issue discussions, with impacts occurring almost daily over recent months.

Hashimoto is the guy behind Vagrant, Terraform (Infrastructure as Code), and much of the HashiCorp ecosystem (Packer, Consul, Vault, Nomad, and others.)

As GitHub user 1299 since February 2008, he described 18+ years of daily use as a core part of his life and open-source career and expressed personal sadness about the departure.

In an April 2026 update, GitHub’s CTO noted the need to scale capacity dramatically (initially targeting 10X, later referencing even higher multiples) to keep pace with demand.

In summary, while GitHub remains the dominant platform for code collaboration, its unprecedented user and activity growth—fueled by global developer adoption and AI tools—has exposed scaling limits, resulting in more frequent reliability challenges that impact developer productivity worldwide. GitHub is said to be actively investing in infrastructure improvements to address these issues.

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Some interesting stats from GitHub Octoverse reports (annual):

Users (Developers on GitHub)

• 2015: ~9 million users
• 2016: 12 million 
• 2018 (following Microsoft acquisition): ~28 million
• 2020: ~56 million
• 2023: 100+ million
• 2024–25: ~100–120 million+ (GitHub blog / Octoverse updates)

Repositories

• 2015: ~21 million repos
• 2018: ~85 million
• 2023: 330+ million repositories
• 2025: 630 million total repositories with +121M new repositories in 2025 

63% of all repositories were public.

Open source saw record participation globally, especially from India

Open source development reached record levels this year with 1.12 billion contributions across public repositories 

Six of the overall top 10 projects by total contributors are AI‑centric (vllm, huggingface/transformers, modelcontextprotocol/servers, llama.cpp, etc.). 

- Article co-written with Grok