GitHub may refuse anonymous clones of public repos. Your CI might be next to fail.
By Lior AharonovFounder, 7IT Solutions ·
On 19 October 2026 GitHub said that during periods of heavy traffic it may temporarily require authentication for some clones and fetches of public repositories over HTTPS on github.com. SSH, pushes, authenticated HTTPS and other web and API traffic are not affected. GitHub says this is not a general authentication requirement for public repositories.
Your build pulls a public dependency with a plain git clone. On a busy afternoon that clone gets an authentication error, and a release goes red for reasons nobody on your team changed.
Search your CI for unauthenticated HTTPS clones of github.com. Use GITHUB_TOKEN in Actions and a GitHub App installation token in other CI systems, and add a retry where a job cannot authenticate.
Anonymous access is a courtesy, never a contract. Build as if the courtesy ends on your release day.
Lior Aharonov · my takeResearched with AI tools; every fact is checked against the linked sources.