OpenAI is quietly building a code-hosting platform meant to replace GitHub, according to a report from The Information published Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the project. The trigger? A string of GitHub outages that kept knocking OpenAI's own engineers offline.
The project is early-stage and months from anything usable. But the fact that it exists at all says something about where things stand between OpenAI and Microsoft, the company that owns GitHub and holds roughly 27% of OpenAI on a diluted basis.
GitHub's rough year
GitHub's reliability problems aren't imagined. The platform has been in the middle of a full infrastructure migration to Microsoft Azure since October 2025, a move that GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov described internally as "existential" for the platform's future. That migration has gone about as smoothly as you'd expect from moving a service used by over 100 million developers while it's still running.
On February 9 alone, GitHub went down five times in roughly twelve hours. Pull requests, webhooks, Actions, Git operations, even Copilot Coding Agent all took hits at various points. Community analysis traces much of the instability to the half-migrated state: traffic split between legacy data centers and Azure, with each side introducing its own failure modes. A June 2025 incident started as a routine database migration and cascaded into a multi-hour platform-wide outage.
Azure itself hasn't helped. A February 2026 Azure outage lasted over 10 hours, taking down virtual machine management across multiple regions and dragging GitHub Actions with it. The Register reported that the root cause was a configuration change that accidentally restricted access to Microsoft-managed storage accounts. The kind of mistake that developers would normally catch in staging.
The Microsoft problem
Here's what makes this awkward. Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion and spent years promising the platform would stay independent. That promise expired last year. After former CEO Thomas Dohmke stepped down in August 2025, GitHub was absorbed into Microsoft's CoreAI division. Feature development was paused to focus on the Azure migration. Internal communications shifted from Slack to Microsoft Teams.
And now OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft holds a significant stake, is building something to compete with a Microsoft product because that product isn't reliable enough. Reuters noted it could not independently verify the report. OpenAI, GitHub, and Microsoft all declined to comment, which is the standard non-denial that usually means a story is directionally correct.
OpenAI employees have reportedly discussed selling the platform to outside customers. That would move this from an internal engineering decision to a direct competitive challenge. Google and Meta both run their own internal code platforms, but neither sells them externally. OpenAI going commercial would be a different kind of provocation.
Can they actually pull it off?
Building a Git hosting service is not the same as building GitHub. The basic repository hosting is straightforward enough, but replicating the CI/CD pipelines, Actions workflows, code review tooling, and third-party integrations that teams depend on daily is a years-long project. OpenAI has the money for it (the company just closed a $110 billion funding round valuing it at $840 billion), but money alone doesn't ship developer tools.
The more interesting question is whether OpenAI would build something specifically designed for AI-assisted development workflows. Their Codex product already has 1.6 million weekly users. A code platform with native LLM integration, agent-driven code review, and automated test generation would at least differentiate it from a straight GitHub clone. But speculation about features is premature when the project apparently doesn't have a firm timeline or even a decision on whether it'll be customer-facing.
For now, this is an engineering team frustrated with downtime doing what engineering teams do: deciding they can build something better. Whether it stays an internal tool or becomes OpenAI's next product line depends on conversations that sound like they're still happening. Either way, Microsoft's developer infrastructure just got a new competitor from inside its own investment portfolio.
