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Comment by mendym | Hacker News Reader

> Our teams are working on the restoration path for returning our impacted git repositories to a public state.

Cant they just make them public? Am i missing something?

If they posted it on an error or outage page then they probably didn't mean to set it that way, and that implies that there was a non-obvious mistake. They might be doing something silly with their permissions.

And that is presuming that this is some sort of technical issue.

...or they mistakenly droppen them. :)

"As part of an internal change task" is the justification listed. Maybe this is a genuine accident.

Someone paranoid might think that the for-profit management at Elastic is trying to pull some of their previously free software behind a paid-for product. Perhaps they accidentally marked all repos private when they only intended to make a few of them private. They have had beef with AWS in the past where they changed their licensing due to things AWS was doing. So I'll fully believe that it was a genuine accident if all the formerly public repos become public again.

unlikely, over the summer they announced that they were going to be more opensource, <https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-aga...>

It's a configuration error (sorry!). Also with thousands of forks this would be a pretty pointless operation. Once something is out (and that includes a license), you cannot just take it back — it will be there forever.

[I work for Elastic]

I'm guessing someone accidentally pushed something they shouldn't have

Not that easy as there are some consequences when you move from public repo to private repo.

I seem to remember someone posting about this once -- you lose all your stars / followers when going public -> private, and they're not restored when you go back.

I would bet, as a result of this and other things like fork management, that they'll be working with GitHub support to try to reverse the go-private and all its consequences.

You can see this now on the link in the post. The repo is currently sitting at

Watch: 194 Forks: 0 Stars: 183

If it's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41060102 Then they will need to delete(or rename), remake the repos and push again. Any security problem would also require doing some due diligence to make sure you really squashed it.

it could be that they might have discovered some credential leak or secrets leakage in the repo and they are fixing it right now.

I don't think so, if you accidentally leak an api key you invalidate that specific key.

Yeah. This was a configuration error. Keys you just rotate. Making repos private accidentally creates a whole new mess with forks, stars,... Not recommended

[I work for Elastic]

It's perhaps an issue on GitHub's end

Pretty sure they would call that out in the status update if it was out of their control.

Why? The issue affects their users regardless of whose fault it is.

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