Musk opened a front against GitHub — and did it on the day it collapsed

While GitHub lay down for several hours, affecting Actions, API and Copilot, Cursor — now part of Elon Musk's empire — turned on the beta version of its own code hosting Origin. The coincidence was so spectacular that Microsoft shares lost more than 3% in a day, and developers on social networks are already discussing whether a redistribution of the market has begun, which seemed unshakable for almost two decades.

Accident as the best advertisement

On August 17 at 13:40 UTC, Issues, Pull Requests, APIs and Actions began pouring in on GitHub — about a fifth of requests to the site returned an error, and downloading archives and raw content of repositories was interrupted in half the cases. It took almost eight hours to figure it out, notes xrust: according to GitHub’s own explanation, the culprit was a bug of repeated requests in Visual Studio Code, which at the height of the incident increased the load on the Copilot authorization service by about ten times and did not allow the system to recover faster.

It was during this window that Cursor announced the launch of Origin, a code storage and collaboration platform that integrates repositories, pull requests, reviews, and merges right inside the Cursor editor. The company emphasizes that no one controlled the timing: the release was prepared in advance, and it coincided with the competitor’s accident by chance. The Internet, however, doesn’t really believe in such coincidences.

What is Origin and how does it differ from GitHub

Formally, Origin is git hosting, that is, a cloud storage for code similar to GitHub. But it is designed not so much for people as for AI agents: about a third of Cursor’s pull requests today are opened by autonomous agents, not by live developers, and the usual hosting model, designed for one person with one intention, is not well suited for this scenario.

Key features:

• repositories are synchronized with GitHub in real time — you can connect an existing project and continue to use both platforms in parallel;
• agents were able to make edits and check the review status without human intervention;
• after Cursor purchased the startup Graphite, Origin built in “stacked” pull requests — an agent can build a chain of dependent branches and not wait for the reviewer to approve the first before starting the second;
• each line added by the agent is marked with metadata: which model wrote it, according to what prompt and with what context — a kind of passport for AI code;
• integrations with Vercel, Buildkite and Depot are ready, the list is promised to be expanded.

Access is currently open in beta mode to paid subscribers — Pro, Teams and Enterprise, and the connection is by default: administrators of corporate accounts need to opt out separately if they are not ready to move.

Where did such ambitions come from

Cursor's courage has a simple explanation: as of August 14, the company is officially owned by SpaceX. The deal is structured in two stages — back in April, SpaceX paid $10 billion for the exclusive right to buy the startup (then called Anysphere) entirely at a valuation of 60 billion, ahead of the investment round that the company was preparing on its own for about 50 billion. At the current exchange rate, the transaction amount is about 4.8 trillion rubles, that is, more than half the annual budget of another average Russian region.

Cursor now operates within the SpaceXAI division — the same division that develops Grok, Grok Build and Grok Bot — and has gained access to the Colossus GPU cluster. According to the company itself, the bet is on making the Grok the most useful model in the world and at the same time pumping up the product line for development. Earlier in August, Musk told employees at an internal meeting at SpaceX that the company needed to succeed in software, and that revenue from AI should exceed revenue from all other divisions combined by September.

For Microsoft, the situation is doubly unpleasant: now the same player owns both the editor in which the code is written, the repository where it lives, and the model that generates it. Analyst Moor Insights & Strategy Jason Andersen warned back in June, before the deal was completed, that xAI’s approaches to restrictions and security issues were very different from what Cursor was famous for — and now this is no longer a hypothetical question, but a practical one: who is responsible for what happens to someone else’s code inside someone else’s infrastructure.

This is where Origin shows its weakness. At the time of launch, Cursor had not published separate terms for processing data hosted directly on Origin — unlike code synced from GitHub, where GitHub's own rules still apply. The existing Cursor policy separates two modes: with Privacy Mode enabled, data is not saved or used for training models (this is a standard for Enterprise), and with Privacy Mode disabled, the company can store and use code, prompts and actions in the editor to develop AI functions. How this will work specifically for repositories on Origin is still unclear.

Why this applies not only to Silicon Valley

GitHub has long become an infrastructure that is almost never thought about, like electricity or plumbing. That is why the transition of even a small part of developers to an alternative does not look like an ordinary software update, but a testing of the waters: is the market even ready to admit that GitHub’s monopoly is not eternal. Analysts at Huatai Securities note that the market for coding tools is generally changing its nature: from an auxiliary function, it is turning into a platform for performing long, multi-step tasks, where one user generates huge volumes of tokens — and therefore revenue — on completion, debugging, testing and refactoring. Unlike regular chat products, coding services are much more deeply embedded in team workflows, so changing tools requires much more effort — but also retains customers more firmly.

For Microsoft, we are not talking about a disaster yet: GitHub brings the company about $2 billion in annual revenue, and Origin, in limited beta status, is unlikely to cause a massive outflow of corporate customers tomorrow. But the symbolic blow was dealt precisely at the moment when the service showed its vulnerability, and in the world of development such coincidences are remembered for a long time.

Sources:

• techcrunch.com
• venturebeat.com

theregister.com

Xrust Musk opened a front against GitHub — and did it on the day it collapsed