Anyone had a issue with Terms of Service Violations

[nicholastyjackson30]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

Body

I am a solo founder using codespace to create a private repo for a standard web application. I have been building for a couple months and never had a single issue. Then one day I went to sign in and my account was locked saying I violated the Terms of Service. I am not sure how that would be possible as I don't use copilot, any scrapping tools or anything. I do use claude to help me when I hit things I need help with, but I am nothing that I can see would violate terms of service. Just curious how long other peoples experience has been on Github responding to a ticket? I believe it is a false trigger maybe due to me losing the debit card that was tied to my google account that was tied to my Github account and it went past due till I got my new card and brought the google account up to date and maybe a email from Github bounced or something. Its been almost a week and I have had no response from Github, and my entire web application is in my private repo, and it is months of work, and almost ready to go live and trying to figure out how to get in touch with someone about why my account was suspended. If you have experienced anything similar I would love to hear how you resolved it or potential timelines anyone has experienced on getting a response from the Github team. Thank you in advance for any help or advice. Cheers.

[xusnitdinov]

If the account is locked for an alleged Terms of Service violation, the main path forward is the official appeal / reinstatement process. Community members cannot clear that lock themselves.

GitHub's policy docs point to the Appeal and Reinstatement form for restricted or suspended accounts:
https://support.github.com/contact/reinstatement

A few practical things I would do:

1. Submit or update the reinstatement request with:

   • your GitHub username
   • the approximate date/time the lock happened
   • the fact that this is a private web app repo for normal development
   • confirmation that you were not using Codespaces for cryptomining, production hosting, scraping abuse, or unrelated server workloads
   • the billing/card timing detail, since that may help support correlate what happened

2. If you still have access to another GitHub account, use it to open a normal support ticket too and reference the locked username plus the reinstatement request, because the support portal can be hard to use when the primary account is restricted.

3. Gather anything that proves normal use before support replies:

   • repo name
   • whether it was private
   • what stack you were building
   • any billing receipts or payment-method timeline if you think billing triggered it

GitHub's Codespaces terms specifically say misuse can lead to restrictions, but they also provide an appeal / reinstatement path:

• Codespaces terms: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-for-additional-products-and-features
• Appeal / reinstatement process: https://github.com/github/site-policy/blob/main/Policies/acceptable-use-policies/github-appeal-and-reinstatement.md

So in short: I would stop waiting for a general reply alone and make sure the reinstatement form is filed, detailed, and tied to the affected username.

[henry-collins101]

I’ve seen cases where GitHub account reviews take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks, depending on the queue and the reason for the lock. A week without a response is frustrating, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the account is permanently blocked.

If you haven’t already, reply to the original support ticket with clear details: your username, repo situation, timeline, and that you believe it was a false positive. Also check the email tied to GitHub, including spam folders, in case their response is getting filtered.