Multiple GitHub Pages sites (7 repos, personal account + org) stuck 404 despite successful builds; custom domain re-add blocked

[rustyisacat]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Pages

Body

Affected repos:

rustyisacat/rustyisacat.github.io (personal user site) → rusty.is-a.dev
rusty-workshop/caelback → caelback.rusty.is-a.dev
rusty-workshop/hyprform → hyprform.rusty.is-a.dev
rusty-workshop/livewall → livewall.rusty.is-a.dev
rusty-workshop/echo-dashboard → echo-dashboard.rusty.is-a.dev
rusty-workshop/echo-dashboard-solo → echo-dashboard-solo.rusty.is-a.dev
rusty-workshop/focusguard → focusguard.rusty.is-a.dev

Summary:
All 7 GitHub Pages sites across my personal account and an organization I own (rusty-workshop) stopped serving content around the same time window (2026-09-03, approximately 21:12-21:13 UTC), and none have recovered since (going on 1+ hour now). This affects both my personal account and a separate org, which suggests something broader than a single repo's misconfiguration.

Symptoms:

Every custom domain above returns 404.
For the main site (rustyisacat/rustyisacat.github.io), even the raw https://rustyisacat.github.io/ URL (no custom domain involved) returns "404 Site not found" — this is the core bug. GET /repos/rustyisacat/rustyisacat.github.io/pages reports "status":"built", and GET .../pages/builds shows the most recent builds completing with "status":"built" and no error message. GitHub's own systems report success, but the site isn't served at all.
On the main site, the custom domain (rusty.is-a.dev) was previously set and verified, but its cname field is now unexpectedly null (I did not change this myself). Attempting to re-add it fails both via the API (PUT /repos/.../pages with cname) and via the Settings → Pages web UI, both returning: "You cannot set a custom domain at this time."
On the 6 org repos, I was able to fully disable and re-enable Pages (the main site's repo refuses deactivation, since GitHub blocks deactivating a user-site repo: "Deactivating GitHub Pages for this repository is not allowed") and successfully re-set each custom domain through the API. Despite that, all 6 are still 404ing at their custom domains, even though each repo's latest build also reports "status":"built" with no errors.

What I've ruled out:

DNS is not the issue. All domains correctly resolve as CNAMEs to the right *.github.io targets (verified via dig).
Not a general GitHub Pages outage. Other unrelated GitHub Pages sites (e.g. octocat.github.io) load fine, and GitHub's public status page shows no open incidents.
Not a build failure. Every affected repo's most recent Pages build reports success with no error message.

What I've already tried (no effect):

Manually triggering rebuilds via POST /pages/builds
Pushing empty commits to force fresh deploys
Fully disabling and re-enabling Pages (where allowed) and re-setting the custom domain
Waiting over an hour — no self-recovery

*Please investigate why builds reported as successful aren't actually being served (returning 404 instead, even at default .github.io URLs with no custom domain involved), and clear whatever is blocking custom domains from being re-added on the affected repos.

[rustyisacat]

Update, additional finding: this isn't limited to Pages. The public API for my own account is also 404ing right now:

$ curl -s https://api.github.com/users/rustyisacat
{"message":"Not Found","documentation_url":"https://docs.github.com/rest","status":"404"}

But my authenticated view of my own account (GET /user) works completely fine and returns the correct data (public_repos, profile fields, etc. all present and correct).

So this looks like an account-level desync between the public-facing view of my account/repos and the actual underlying data, not something specific to Pages builds or any individual repo. Tried creating a fresh throwaway repo to test whether the issue was repo-specific (i.e. whether a brand new Pages site would work fine) — gh repo create itself failed because it needs the public users/rustyisacat endpoint to resolve the owner, which is the same 404 above.

Flagging this since it points at something broader than "some Pages builds arent being served" - it looks like my accounts public-facing data (profile, repos, and by extension Pages) is out of sync with whats actually stored.