HTTP 429 Errors on Authenticated Requests to *.githubusercontent.com/*

[memcap]

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We’ve recently started encountering persistent HTTP 429 errors during our CI/CD workflows when making authenticated requests to .githubusercontent.com/.

A few key details:

• We are authenticated using a GitHub token.
• We are within rate limits as reported by the API headers.
• Throttling or retry delays do not resolve the issue.
• This is breaking our build system and has made deployment unreliable.
• Re-running builds in hopes of bypassing the 429s has dramatically increased compute time and cost.

Given the recent changes - it’s unexpected for authenticated requests to be rate-limited this aggressively.

Regards.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[chess-king-dot]

Hi, how are you ?
We hit the same issue recently, it turns out githubusercontent.com is rate-limited separately from the GitHub API, even for authenticated users. We fixed it by caching the files locally in our CI and avoiding repeated downloads.
If that’s not possible, using a mirror or staggering requests also helps.

[memcap]

Thanks for the suggestion — much appreciated. We may need to look into a similar workaround, though it does feel like this behavior borders on a bug. Hopefully GitHub addresses it soon.

[chess-king-dot]

Totally agree, it caught us off guard too.
Would be great if GitHub clarified or softened the throttling on these endpoints.
In the meantime, hope the workaround holds up for you!

[ItsBrank]

Been like this for a few weeks, GitHub still hasn't increased the limits at all despite people complaining about the same thing. You may need to look into moving away from GitHub itself because they don't seem to have any intentions to change.

[chess-king-dot]

We’ve identified that recent HTTP 429 errors during our CI/CD processes stem from aggressive rate limiting on githubusercontent.com, which operates separately from GitHub's API and does not honor authentication in the same way.
As an interim solution, we are caching dependencies locally and reducing repeated external fetches to stabilize our builds.
We're also evaluating longer-term options, including mirroring key assets internally, while awaiting clarification or improvements from GitHub.