GitHub Suspected of Actively Blocking Mainland China IP Addresses, Access Situation Drastically Changes!

Dear developers, today you may face a frustrating reality.

In the past, although directly connecting to GitHub was slow and prone to lag, and even inaccessible in some regions, this was often attributed to network environment filtering. Mainland China did not completely block access to GitHub.

However, the situation seems to have changed dramatically today: a large number of users are reporting that GitHub has begun to actively block IP addresses from mainland China. This means that if you don't use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) or other circumvention tools, you may be completely unable to access most of GitHub's content.

According to current observations:

• Without logging in: Access to GitHub almost completely fails. You may still be able to barely open the homepage, but trying to access repositories, personal profiles, or any other page will generally result in a "Forbidden" error.
• Logged in: Some users who were previously logged in report that they can still load pages extremely slowly without using a VPN, but the experience is much worse than before, and it is unknown how long this will last.
• Key signal: More worryingly, tests show that even GitHub's login page (github.com/login) is now directly returning a 403 Forbidden error (as shown in the image below).

What signal does this send?

It is usually unlikely to completely block access to the core login page simply for anti-crawling purposes. Feedback posts about this issue have already appeared in GitHub's official discussion groups, but as of now, the official has not provided any explanation or response.

We still don't know the specific reasons behind this block. But what is certain is that it has turned the path for domestic developers to access GitHub from a "one-way blockage" (mainly affected by the local network environment) to a "two-way blockage" (GitHub actively blocking).

This sudden "combined effort" undoubtedly adds insult to injury for Chinese open-source developers and users who rely on GitHub for learning and work. What the future holds and what the reasons are, we can only continue to follow...