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Github confirms random 401 responses on unauthenticated git clones are no mistake (eviltoast.org)

submitted 4 weeks ago by orhtej2@eviltoast.org to c/programming@programming.dev

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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.

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[-] orhtej2@eviltoast.org 12 points 4 weeks ago

I'm not sure scrappers are so kind to git clone instead of rendering every single file in HTML 🤔

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 3 points 4 weeks ago

I expect they are for GitHub. GitHub is really well known and huge so it makes sense to set up specific scrapers for it.

[-] orhtej2@eviltoast.org 1 points 4 weeks ago

Fair enough, may as well be the case.

[-] howrar@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 weeks ago

The web page is probably behind CloudFlare or something similar.

this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026

159 points (99.4% liked)

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