OpenAI building GitHub alternative after frequent platform outages and disruptions — a public OpenAI code repository would directly compete with one of its biggest investors
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OpenAI is developing its own code repository platform as an alternative to Microsoft's GitHub, according to a report from The Information. The project was prompted by a rise in GitHub outages that left OpenAI engineers unable to commit or collaborate on code for stretches of up to several hours, two people working at large GitHub customers told the publication.
The project is still in early stages and probably won't be completed for months, a person with knowledge of it told The Information. Employees working on it have discussed the possibility of selling access to the platform to OpenAI customers — though the company could ultimately keep it exclusively for internal use.
GitHub's reliability has degraded noticeably over the past year, following an overhaul of its infrastructure. GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov told employees in an October memo that the platform would migrate all of its software to Microsoft Azure within two years, calling the move "existential" to meet the demands of AI-powered tools such as GitHub Copilot.
Platform migration began in October 2025 and is still in progress, which means GitHub is running in a split-traffic state across its legacy Virginia data center and Azure. Multiple recent outages have been attributed either directly to Azure or to configuration issues introduced during the migration. In early February, a four-hour outage was traced to an underlying Azure problem. A separate outage a week later, which took down many GitHub services for around three hours, was attributed to a configuration change — with GitHub acknowledging in a public incident report that its availability was "not yet meeting our expectations."
GitHub reported a 58% year-over-year increase in incidents during the first half of 2025, rising from 69 cases to 109 — with 17 classified as "major" — totaling over 100 hours of disruption, according to a mid-year report from GitProtect.
If OpenAI does sell the platform commercially, particularly bundled with its Codex coding agents, it will mark a direct competitive move against Microsoft. Microsoft currently holds roughly 27% of OpenAI, and acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion. OpenAI has already encroached on other Microsoft territory: It's reportedly developing ChatGPT features that overlap with Office applications for document collaboration and presentation editing.
Building internal code repositories is not unusual for large tech companies. Google runs Piper, and Meta runs Sapling — though neither has been released as a commercial product. An OpenAI commercial offering would be a different proposition — though losing OpenAI as a customer would be mostly symbolic for GitHub, given its tens of millions of paying users, according to the source from The Information.
