- Sources: primary, discussion
- Summary: A GitHub Community Admin states in discussion 206581 that rate-limited unauthenticated Git requests over HTTPS now return HTTP 401 where they previously returned 403, because 403 has no provision to retry with authentication and would block a request that Git could have authenticated. The reporter and the discussion title describe the clone failures as intermittent rather than constant.
- Comments: Commenters report that setting
git config http.version HTTP/1.1 resolves the failure with no credential change, and that git 2.53.0 does not reproduce it. - Why it matters: A CI job cloning a public repository anonymously can fail intermittently at the negotiation step, and the 401 is what lets Git retry with credentials where the earlier 403 failed outright.
- Follow-up: Track whether GitHub identifies a cause for the intermittent failures.
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