Paid Enterprise + Organization vanished (404) with zero notice — 4 days, no support response

[zhanzhihyang]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

Body

Our company's paid GitHub Enterprise and Organization disappeared 4+ days ago without any notice, and we have been unable to get a human response from support. Posting here hoping someone from GitHub staff can help route this.

What happened

On Friday (Aug 7), our organization and enterprise both became 404 simultaneously:

• Organization 3270101 → 404
• Enterprise anteng → 404
• All 29 repositories (23 private) inaccessible
• All four org owners independently confirmed the same 404 — this is not a single-account issue

What we've verified

• No one deleted anything: personal security logs show no org removal/deletion events for any owner
• No notice received: no email, no in-product warning, no violation notice
• Not a platform outage: githubstatus.com was all green at the time
• Subscription fully paid: $838.94 charged on Aug 1, six days before the incident

The catch-22

Because the enterprise vanished, our support plan downgraded to Standard ("Technical support not included") — so the paid 24/7 enterprise support we need for this exact situation is unavailable. Tickets #4641517 and #4641693 have been open for 4+ days with no human response.

What we're asking

1. Is our repository data intact?
2. If this was triggered by automated abuse detection (our team had a period of high-frequency commits and heavy Copilot usage — all legitimate work by real employees), how do we appeal?

Any pointer to the right team or process would be hugely appreciated.

[zhanzhihyang]

RESOLVED — posting the full outcome for anyone who hits this in the future.

GitHub Support investigated and found the root cause: three months ago we had cancelled an Enterprise trial, which scheduled the enterprise for deletion after 90 days. We then converted to a paid subscription — but the deletion schedule was never revoked. When the 90 days elapsed, the system deleted the enterprise and its organization, even though the account was active and paid.

How it was resolved:

• The organization and all 30 repositories were recovered by support, with visibility settings intact
• Org settings (members, teams, billing) could not be restored and had to be rebuilt manually
• The old enterprise itself was unrecoverable, but the slug was released and we re-registered it
• Support enabled Copilot on the new enterprise after activation

Lessons learned, in case they help someone:

1. If you ever cancelled an Enterprise trial and later converted to paid, ask support to confirm there is no pending deletion schedule on your account
2. Keep local mirror clones (git clone --mirror) of critical repos — during the outage this was our only guaranteed copy
3. If your enterprise disappears, your support plan silently downgrades with it — a billing-category ticket still gets routed even on the free tier
4. GitHub Support (Mark and Jimmy) resolved everything properly once a human picked it up — the data was never actually lost

Thanks to everyone at GitHub who helped.