Origin ships to Cursor's paying customers hours before GitHub's seven-hour failure

Cursor began shipping its code-hosting platform, called Origin, to paying customers on Monday. Hours later, GitHub experienced an outage that lasted about seven hours.

Origin ships as GitHub’s status page lights up

Cursor’s paid users got the rollout Monday morning. After about three and a half hours, GitHub’s incident log listed a global degradation that lasted for over six hours.

Across pull requests, issues, and the API, error rates were around 20%. They drove the error rate on archive and raw file downloads toward 50%. It brought down enterprise sign-on, as well as SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning, Team Sync, and Copilot.

Product launches are booked weeks in advance, and there is no evidence Cursor engineered the overlap. But it was still a marketing bonanza for the company. Matt Palmer of Cursor quote-tweeted the launch, saying the team wanted to ship earlier, but GitHub was down.

Vercel’s chief executive, Guillermo Rauch, said on X that developers may now host their repositories on Origin and deploy to Vercel, saying it was online, unlike GitHub. When asked why he was smiling, Rauch said he was trying to make light of the fact that Vercel itself was stuck because of the GitHub outage.

Pushes still go to GitHub, which remains the definitive source for everything that originated there. Permissions are identical to GitHub’s read/write permissions.

Pull requests are synced between Cursor and GitHub. For example, a comment added in Cursor will appear in GitHub and vice versa. Cursor’s blog said a team’s GitHub repositories can live next to Cursor-hosted ones.

Graphite’s co-founder now runs Origin

Cursor puts agents, code, and pull requests all in one place. For example, a developer sends the agent a review comment, then the agent edits the pull request.

Vercel builds a live preview of every pull request. Depot and Buildkite run the builds. Existing GitHub Actions workflows work as-is, no rewriting.

Cursor acquired Graphite, a code-review company, in December 2025 at a price far above its $290 million Series B valuation. Graphite built stacked pull requests, and now its co-founder Tomas Reimers leads Origin.

He unveiled it first at Cursor’s Compile conference in June. The premise is that, according to Google’s 2025 DORA report of almost 5,000 professionals, writing code requires extensive reviewing.

GitHub suffered 257 outages in the past year, a series of failures tied to “a visible exodus of high-profile users.” Cursor is establishing Origin to take advantage of that annoyance.

As of last October, GitHub had ~180 million developers. GitHub’s own Octoverse 2025 count showed 180 million developers, 630 million repositories, and 43.2 million pull requests merged each month, up 23% year over year. GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, is still the world’s largest source code host.

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