On August 16, my GitHub account was suspended. No email and no warning. I opened the site and found my account gone.
I hadn’t violated any policy, and I still don’t know why the flag was raised. Whatever caught me was wrong, and nobody ever told me what it was.
On September 30, 45 days later, the account came back. There was no email this time either. I found out by logging in, the same way I found out about the ban.
This is not a tutorial. It’s what those 45 days felt like, and what I think they say about how our industry works.
What Happened
- August 16: Account flagged and suspended. No notice.
- Right after: I submitted a reinstatement request. (August 18)
- The following weeks: Four follow-up emails. Short, polite, same information each time.
- Also: I reached out to people who had connections inside GitHub, hoping a human who could actually act would look at my case.
- September 30: Restored. No explanation and no announcement.
I can’t say which of these, if any, made the difference. That is the honest truth. After 45 days, I still don’t know what worked.
The Part Nobody Tells You
The support form didn’t feel like a path to a solution. It felt like dropping a letter into a hole and listening for an echo.
So I did what people do when the official door is closed: I looked for a side door. I wrote to people who knew people. That should bother you. When the fastest route to fix a clear mistake is who you know instead of what the facts are, the system isn’t working as a system. It’s working as a favor.
And most people don’t have that side door. I was lucky to have a few people willing to try.
What I Actually Stood to Lose
Let me be direct about the stakes, because they’re easy to underestimate from outside.
For a developer, GitHub isn’t a hobby account. It is:
- Your portfolio. Every link on my CV points there.
- Your history. Years of commits, contributions, and open source work.
- Your proof. The thing a stranger checks in thirty seconds to decide if you can really do the job.
Now imagine an interview in those 45 days. A recruiter clicks your link and sees a 404. Or a student submitting a scholarship or graduate application, with coursework and projects hosted there, and a deadline that doesn’t move. Or someone whose only evidence of skill, because they’re self-taught, lives on that one account.
A professional or academic career can be damaged by a single flag nobody explains and nobody is accountable for.
The Support Problem
Here is what bothers me most. This was not a hard case.
There was no complicated dispute, no gray area, no policy to interpret. Someone or something raised a flag, and the flag was wrong. I hadn’t broken any rule. Looking at the account honestly would have shown that in minutes.
I’ll say something that may sound harsh: an AI chatbot could have solved this dozens of times faster than the process I went through. Give it the account, the flag, and the policies. Ask one question: is there a violation here? It would have recognized the error, and I’d have been back in a day instead of a month and a half.
I’m not saying AI should make final decisions on bans. I’m saying that even a basic review layer, anything that reads the case instead of queueing it, would have beaten a silent 45 days. The bar was never “perfect support.” The bar was “read one ticket and notice it’s a mistake.”
Proof of Work
There’s a philosophical side to this that I can’t stop thinking about.
Companies rely on platforms like GitHub to judge developers, and honestly, that’s reasonable. A CV says anything. Code is evidence. Commits, pull requests, and contribution history are hard to fake over years. As a way to evaluate skill, it beats most alternatives, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
The irony is hard to miss.
A platform built to prove that developers can build things removed my proof, and gave me no way to explain myself to a human being.
A company that champions AI that writes code couldn’t use it to read one support request.
And I spent 45 days writing emails to convince a system that my work, which was sitting in plain sight and was already on my own machine, was real. The real thing was never in danger. The only thing in danger was the proof, and that depended on someone else.
What I Did With the 45 Days
I didn’t want to sit and wait, so I treated it like any other problem: find what I control and push on it.
- Kept my local clones safe, since git stores full history on your machine.
- Mirrored my projects to a second remote so I could keep working:
# add a second remote (GitLab, Codeberg, your own server...)
git remote add backup git@gitlab.com:username/project.git
# push all branches and tags
git push backup --mirror- Kept learning and building. The ban took away my profile. It couldn’t take what I know.
What I’d Tell Someone Else
- Back up your work before anything goes wrong. Your platform account is not your backup.
- Don’t trust one platform as your only proof. Keep a personal site, a second remote, anything you control.
- Document everything. Dates, messages, usernames. A timeline keeps you sane.
- Stay calm in writing. Every email I sent was polite, even when I wasn’t.
- Use every door. The official path may be slow, and contacts may help. Don’t feel ashamed of it.
- Expect silence. Both the ban and the restore can arrive with no message at all.
Conclusion
My account is back. My code was never gone, and neither was my skill. But those 45 days changed how I see this whole ecosystem.
We built an industry where your career can depend on an account you don’t control, reviewed by a process that doesn’t answer. Most of the time it works fine. Then one day it doesn’t, and you find out how much of your identity was sitting on someone else’s server.
Own your work. Keep copies. And don’t assume the system will notice when it’s wrong.
If this has happened to you, I’d like to hear how you handled it.