Since yesterday a lot of users in Europe found their workflows failing due to Github seemingly randomly throwing HTTP/401 on git clone/git pull when interacting with public repos without authentication.

It was now confirmed by staff member that this indeed is intentional and no further steps are planned at this point.

  • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    9 hours ago

    Our aim is to make public repositories accessible without authentication as much as possible. However, like much of the Internet, we continue to see significant increases in the volume of robot traffic recently which has increased the need for verification, for example CAPTCHAs.

    As I expected, it’s about combating (excessive) bot traffic.