On 30 June, at nine minutes past three in the afternoon, a machine at GitHub decided I was a machine. It locked my account. My repositories, my profile, my Pages, all of it went 404 to the world. Not deleted. I could still see everything from the inside. Just switched off, so that to everyone else I had simply never existed. No email. No warning. No reason. And I was asleep when it happened.
What it saw
I pulled my own security log before I got angry, because I wanted to be fair. I will not pretend the machine hallucinated. My tools had been busy: more than a thousand OAuth tokens minted and rotated, hundreds of repositories created and destroyed by automation running in my name. To an abuse detector, that is not a person. That is a bot.
Here is the part that still stings. I have never used GitHub Copilot. Not once. Yet two Copilot apps churned 963 of those tokens on their own, from January to June, an integration I never turned on, working under my name while I was somewhere else living my life. I did not use the feature. The feature used me. And then it got me flagged.
A door with no one behind it
To appeal, GitHub sends you to a screen that asks you to prove you are human. A captcha. It never loaded for me.
That is the whole thing in one picture. A red error saying it cannot verify me, and a green checkmark underneath saying I am verified. Both at once. No text ever arrived. No ticket ever opened. No person ever answered, because there is no person. It is machines all the way down.
I am not special. Michal Flaška lost around a thousand repositories exactly this way, pulled his logs like I pulled mine, and found the same culprit: “the bad actor didn’t delete anything. GitHub’s own automation did.” He waited forty days. Another developer gave up by day ten and left for Codeberg, where I am now. There are dozens of us saying the same three sentences. Same 404. Same silence. Same machine.
What I actually signed up for
I subscribed to a tool. Machines I would orchestrate, machines I would give orders to. Build this. Run that. Host my work. I never signed up to be judged by machines I do not command, machines that flag me, lock me, and shut a door in my face while no human watches. The only machines I ever agreed to work with are the ones that take my orders, never the ones that give them to me.
A multi-trillion-dollar company decided humans do not scale, and quietly removed them. What is left flagged me, gated me, ignored me, and a marketing page calls it support.
So keep it
GitHub, you do not have to restore my account. Please, don’t bother.
I care about code more than almost anything I make, and I cannot keep what I love in a place where no one like me is home. Thinking about you now makes me nauseous, and I do not need that in my life.
I took my work, and I left. I am not coming back.