GitHub faces leadership exodus and rising outages after Microsoft restructuring

GitHub is going through a major management crisis after Microsoft folded the platform into its CoreAI division and chose not to appoint a new CEO, The Verge reports. The world's largest code hosting platform has since seen a wave of senior departures and a growing number of technical outages.

The trouble began after CEO Thomas Dohmke stepped down in August 2025. Rather than replacing him, Microsoft moved GitHub under its AI division CoreAI, headed by former Meta engineer Jay Parikh. The independent status that Microsoft promised to preserve when it acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018 has effectively disappeared, with the remaining team now reporting directly to CoreAI.

The reorganization has been accompanied by a steady stream of senior departures. According to The Verge, the exits include Julia Liuson, the head of Microsoft's developer tools division and a 34-year company veteran, and former GitHub chief commercial officer Elizabeth Pemmerl. Senior vice president Jared Palmer, who only joined the team in October, has moved to the Xbox division. At least 11 employees have also left to join Entire, a startup founded by Dohmke after his departure that may end up competing directly with GitHub. One current employee summed up the situation by saying that GitHub effectively no longer exists as an independent entity.

The management turmoil has coincided with serious technical issues. GitHub recorded 10 separate service degradation incidents in April alone. The company's CTO publicly apologized for the increasing frequency of outages, attributing them to a sharp rise in load and the ongoing migration of GitHub's infrastructure to Azure servers. The instability has already begun to drive developers away. Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of the Ghostty terminal emulator, publicly announced he was leaving the platform.

Security incidents have added to the pressure. Attackers recently compromised around 3,800 internal GitHub repositories through a malicious extension installed on an employee's device. Earlier, researchers at Wiz uncovered a critical vulnerability that exposed access to millions of projects. Against this backdrop, GitHub Copilot, the company's flagship AI assistant, is reportedly falling behind competitors such as Cursor and Claude Code. Starting June 1, individual plans will also be subject to new usage limits, with overages triggering additional fees.