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GitHub under pressure amid outages, vulnerabilities, and internal breach
22 May 2026

GitHub, the popular code-sharing platform owned by Microsoft, is facing a series of major challenges.

The company has been hit by multiple outages in recent weeks and is dealing with a remote code execution vulnerability.

In addition to these technical issues, GitHub's internal repositories were also compromised through a "poisoned" Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension on an employee's device.

Loss of independence following restructuring
Management shakeup

The troubles at GitHub can be traced back to last summer when former CEO Thomas Dohmke resigned.

His departure led to a major restructuring of the company's operations under Microsoft's control.

Microsoft didn't appoint a new CEO, leaving the rest of GitHub's leadership team reporting directly to Microsoft's CoreAI team.

This change has reportedly been difficult for GitHub employees, who had enjoyed their independence for so long.

Talent exodus and AI competition concerns
Market rivalry

Since Dohmke's exit, GitHub has witnessed a talent exodus. Some employees have followed him to his new start-up, Entire, which is likely to compete directly with GitHub.

Meanwhile, Jay Parikh, head of the CoreAI team that oversees GitHub under Microsoft's control, is said to be worried about competition from Cursor and Claude Code.

Despite an early lead in AI coding tools like Copilot, GitHub has fallen behind its rivals in the last year or so.

High-profile departures from GitHub
Employee unrest

GitHub has also seen high-profile departures from its ranks.

Julia Liuson, a veteran Microsoft executive who oversaw GitHub's revenue, engineering, and support after Dohmke's departure, announced her exit last month.

Jared Palmer, who joined GitHub as a senior vice president in October, is leaving for a job at Xbox.

Elizabeth Pemmerl, GitHub's former chief revenue officer, also announced her resignation last month.

Apology over persistent outages
Crisis management

In light of the recent outages, GitHub's CTO, Vladimir Fedorov, had to apologize last month. He acknowledged that the company was struggling with a huge growth spike in recent years.

The outages have been particularly bad over the past year, amid GitHub's migration to Azure servers.

This project was started by Fedorov months after joining GitHub in an effort to tackle data center capacity issues.

Security breaches add to GitHub's woes
Security concerns

Along with outages, GitHub is also dealing with security issues.

In March, the company quickly patched a critical vulnerability after Wiz Research used AI models to discover it.

The flaw could have allowed attackers to access millions of public and private code repositories.

Earlier this week, 3,800 internal GitHub code repositories were hacked after an employee installed a malicious VS Code extension.