GitHub blocked my account. I don’t know why or for how long.

Update [2026-08-13]

The account is unblocked now, two months later.

Sometimes our abuse detecting systems highlight accounts that need to be manually reviewed.
We’ve cleared the restrictions from your account, so you have full access to GitHub again.

So all good?

I still don’t know why my account was blocked in the first place. Probably GitHub doesn’t just not tell us, but doesn’t fully know themselves, either: Some fuzzy AI rule fired. In a mere 2 months, somebody got around to disarm the false alarm.

May happen again any time …

Original post

tl;dr: If you need any old repository, use the cloned versions at sebawild2.

As of now, four weeks on, GitHub still blocked by account sebawild.
(It is invisible to others, but let’s me log in and access my repositories.)

The overall episode is rather annoying: You get blocked and there’s no reason given. You can file a ticket, but for weeks nobody replies or acts upon it. There are no alternatives to waiting and hoping that, eventually, support gets to the ticket – from community posts, this might be anywhere from days to months(!).

I guess I get the service I pay for in this case …
(Academic use is free unless you get very active with AI.)
Still, the handling is unprofessional. Clearly, GitHub prioritizes further AI deployments over their core services.

My takeaway from this ongoing experience is a lesson in digital sovereignty: Relying on a US private company for hosting code referenced in my research paper is questionable, no matter how convenient GitHub is. (I still love their product.)

Luckily, git makes it easy to have decentralized backups. Where I will long term host code is not decided yet.