I cannot comment on the reasons, why's or whatnot of this particular issue, but I do wonder about the outcry of "not having access to download the repo"?

I mean, aside from maybe not having any forks (because you can fork another repo to your repo, but not do anything with it - so you may not have a copy) - your stuff should reside on your local box, right?

Unless you've been editing everything in the repo using the editors provided by github, or some other similar service, and never did a git clone of your own repo?

That is - you were using git...well, I can't say "wrong", but maybe "wrong-ish"...?