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.
DDOS is most effective on expensive endpoints. A git clone isn’t exactly cheap. Fetching is especially expensive if you vary the revisions you fetch.
Does GitHub have an alternative here? A Git-compatible protocol with anonymous access that is DDoS-resilient?