Cursor launches Origin, a rival to GitHub, amid outage frustration

GitHub has long been the de facto code host preferred by most developers, but the platform has recently struggled with widely reported outages and performance issues — and Cursor is angling to pick up the slack. The AI startup, now officially part of SpaceX, launched Origin this week: a new code-hosting platform designed to do everything developers typically use GitHub for, including collaborating on codebases, browsing and editing them, handling pull requests, and storing them in repositories.

The move is a natural next step for Cursor, whose primary business until now has been selling automated web-development services through its AI Code Editor. Cursor has said “agent native” features will soon be available for Origin, though it hasn’t shared many details yet, and the company says it’s building a wider “app ecosystem” to support broader coding efforts within Origin.

Notably, using Origin doesn’t require abandoning GitHub — it’s designed to let developers work alongside GitHub and move code between the two platforms. “Your GitHub repos can sit alongside the ones Cursor hosts,” Cursor said on its blog. “Connect GitHub to Cursor, pick your org, and you’ll see the repos you can sync. Select one and Cursor pulls it in.”

Origin’s launch coincides with ongoing frustration over a perceived dip in GitHub’s service quality. On the same day Cursor launched its new platform, GitHub suffered a lengthy worldwide outage, with the site’s functions reportedly degraded for over six hours and a nearly 20% error rate worldwide. It wasn’t the first such incident: earlier this year, after a rash of outages, GitHub announced new steps meant to placate frustrated developers as its availability problems seemed to escalate. More broadly, the platform has suffered 257 outages over the past year, according to a recent LeadDev analysis, which found the pattern has driven a visible departure of high-profile users.

Still, Cursor has its work cut out if it wants to compete with GitHub. By GitHub’s own count, some 180 million developers used the platform as of last October. Founded in 2007 and acquired by Microsoft in 2012, GitHub remains the largest source-code host in the world.

Why it matters

Cursor’s timing is pointed: it launched Origin the same day a worldwide GitHub outage degraded the dominant code host’s service for hours, but unseating a platform with some 180 million developers won’t be easy.