GitHub Battles Outages, Hacks, and Talent Drain at Microsoft

GitHub is fighting for its survival at Microsoft amid a surge of outages, security issues, and pressure from competitors. When Microsoft announced its $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub in 2018, developers were nervous about the company controlling the platform. Nearly eight years later, the developer platform faces multiple major outages, disclosed a remote code execution vulnerability, and suffered a hack of its internal code repositories due to a “poisoned” VS Code extension on an employee’s device.

Current and former GitHub employees describe a company struggling with a lack of leadership and pressure from competitors. A lot of GitHub’s current struggles trace back to last summer when former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke resigned. This triggered a big shakeup, as Microsoft did not replace Dohmke’s CEO position. As a result, the rest of GitHub’s leadership team reports directly to Microsoft’s CoreAI team.

GitHub employees, who refer to themselves as Hubbers, have struggled to adapt after being proudly independent for so long. The CoreAI team is led by Jay Parikh, the former Meta engineering chief whom Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella personally recruited last year to help with the company’s AI transformation. Sources say Parikh isn’t well-liked by Microsoft employees and that it was his decision not to appoint a new GitHub CEO.

Since Dohmke’s departure, an ongoing talent drain has affected GitHub. Some employees followed Dohmke to his Entire startup, a new developer platform that will compete directly with GitHub. Out of the 30 employees listed at Entire, at least 11 of them used to work at GitHub.

Parikh is reportedly concerned about the threat of competition from Cursor and Claude Code. While GitHub Copilot had an early lead in the AI coding wars, it has fallen behind rivals over the past year or so. The Information reported that Parikh has privately warned colleagues that GitHub “faces a critical threat.” Microsoft had also reportedly considered acquiring Cursor in recent months. Microsoft is canceling many of its own Claude Code licenses in an effort to get its developers to help improve GitHub Copilot.

Leadership departures have continued in recent months. Veteran Microsoft executive Julia Liuson announced her departure from Microsoft last month after 34 years at the company. GitHub previously reported to Liuson before the formation of CoreAI, and she oversaw GitHub revenue, engineering, and support after Dohmke’s departure. Jared Palmer, who joined GitHub in October as a senior vice president, is already leaving for a job at Xbox as VP of engineering and a technical adviser to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. The new Xbox chief has hired former Microsoft CoreAI executives eager to leave Parikh’s leadership. Elizabeth Pemmerl, GitHub’s former chief revenue officer, also announced her resignation last month. Dan Stein was appointed as the new chief revenue officer for GitHub.