On the evening of April 12, a large number of domestic developers discovered that when accessing GitHub without logging in, the page displayed a 403 error message stating "This IP address is subject to access restrictions", and even the login page could not be opened. However, logged-in users and developers connected through SSH could still access temporarily. This incident quickly caused shock in the technology circle, and related topics continued to ferment on social media. Developers questioned GitHub's technical stability and policy neutrality.
GitHub officially issued a statement on the afternoon of April 13, stating that the failure was "due to an unexpected impact caused by a configuration change." The problem of restricted access for Chinese users who have not logged in has been alleviated at 14:55 UTC on April 13, and the relevant configuration has been revoked. But this explanation failed to completely quell the controversy, with some developers pointing out that the blockade was significantly geographically targeted.
Amid the outcry, developers responded in a variety of ways. Some users bypass restrictions by modifying the hosts file or using domestic mirror sites (such as https://kgithub.com), but mirror sites generally have response delays and data synchronization problems. More companies are beginning to evaluate the feasibility of migrating to domestic platforms. Visits to code hosting services such as Gitee and Coding have surged, and some teams have started the code migration process. However, there are still gaps between domestic platforms and GitHub in terms of functional completeness and community activity, and it will take time to fully replace them.
As of now, GitHub access has returned to normal, but the aftermath of the incident is still lingering. The developer community continues to pay attention to whether GitHub will introduce technical measures to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents, and whether regulatory authorities will strengthen compliance inspections of overseas code hosting platforms. As a senior developer said in the forum: "The 12-hour outage made us realize that open source has no borders, but code has nationality. The initiative of technical security must ultimately be held in our own hands."
This information comes from the Internet. If there is any infringement, please contact news@onlinedown.net to delete it~
