GitHub went CEO-less inside Microsoft's CoreAI — outages, a breach and an exodus followed

The Verge's Tom Warren reported on May 21, 2026 that GitHub, bought by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018, was battling outages, security problems and competition. He traced much of this to summer 2025, when CEO Thomas Dohmke resigned. Microsoft did not replace him, so GitHub's leaders reported directly to Microsoft's CoreAI team under Jay Parikh. Sources told Warren it was Parikh's decision not to appoint a new GitHub CEO.

Warren listed what followed. Leaders left, including former chief revenue officer Elizabeth Pemmerl and a senior vice president who had joined in October. At least 11 of the 30 people listed at Dohmke's new startup Entire had worked at GitHub. GitHub also had multiple major outages in recent weeks, and CTO Vladimir Fedorov apologised personally. In a separate incident, 3,800 internal repositories were breached after an employee installed a malicious VS Code extension.

Developers reacted. Ghostty creator Mitchell Hashimoto announced he was moving the project off GitHub after 18 years. Reported pressure on Copilot from Cursor and Claude Code added to the strain. Fedorov said the outages came with a growth spike and an ongoing migration to Azure, and set priorities of availability first, then capacity, then new features.

Microsoft left the CEO seat empty after Dohmke resigned, so GitHub's leaders reported into CoreAI rather than to one head of GitHub.

Staff who spoke to Warren said leadership was missing and that GitHub was now run from inside Microsoft, a loss of independence they struggled to adapt to.

Fedorov linked the outages to a huge rise in pull requests, commits and repositories, with the Azure migration under way.

Folding an independent platform into a parent's org chart without a named leader can drain talent and focus just when competitors close in. Reliability slips first.

As of the May 2026 report, GitHub had a new chief revenue officer, with revenue reporting into Microsoft's MCAPS and product work split into its Developer Division. Microsoft had reportedly considered buying Cursor and was cancelling many internal Claude Code licences to push developers toward Copilot. Parikh reportedly warned colleagues GitHub 'faces a critical threat.'