If Github doesn't at least monitor their 404 error rate for large-scale spikes, whoever is in charge of SRE should be fired.

With no announcements and no response to a now two day old bug report, I see two possibilities:

1)Their monitoring of their infrastructure and monitoring of issues is shockingly incompetent for a company of their size and importance (the fact that it is a US holiday is irrelevant.)

2)This was 100% intentional and they're purposefully looking "incompetent" to get people to shift to using other services for downloads.

My money is on the latter, given others in this discussion are reporting random download link failures starting a month or two ago. A huge number of projects seem to use GitHub as a sort of free file hosting service. I imagine the opex for both storage and bandwidth is a not insignificant amount of money and someone has been told to shoo the freeloaders off the grass.

Announcing they're ending free file hosting for unpaid projects would generate a lot of noise and PR. Instead they just make it unreliable, and people go elsewhere. Multiple people in this discussion have described moving downloads of Github in response, which is exactly what Github likely wants.