Historical contributions disappeared after deleting and re-adding my verified email

[codebreaker0511]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Profile

Hi everyone,

I accidentally deleted an email address associated with my GitHub account. Immediately after deleting it, all my historical contributions disappeared from my contribution graph.

I re-added the exact same email address and verified it. I also checked the .patch files of my old commits and confirmed that the author email matches the email now associated with my GitHub account.

It's been four days, but my historical contributions still haven't returned. My new contributions are showing up normally; only my historical contributions are missing.

I've tried checking the email association and confirming that the old commits use the correct email, but the issue persists.

Has anyone experienced this issue or found a way to restore their historical contributions? Is there a way for GitHub staff to investigate or refresh the historical contribution graph?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[kittimzhe]

Your instincts were right and the fix you applied is the correct one — deleting an email really does unlink the commits authored by it, and re-adding + verifying is the documented path back. The remaining wait is explained by two stacked things:

1. Re-attribution isn't instant even normally — the graph re-links in batches, typically within 24 hours of the email being verified. You're at four days, which points at the second thing:

2. Profile data processing is currently lagging platform-wide. The umbrella incident thread #203416 ("Profile rendering issues") has staff-confirmed multi-day delays in profile processing since late September — 125 comments and counting; my own profile data from mid-September is still partially pending. New contributions rendering while historical ones lag is exactly the shape of a backlog draining through a queue.

One check worth doing while you wait (the author/committer split that bites people in exactly this situation): the .patch shows only the author email. If your git config ever differed mid-history, sample the old commits with:

git log --format='%h %ae %ce' --all

Any committer address (%ce) different from the author's needs to be attached to your account too — re-adding one address only repairs the commits where it appears in both roles.

If the graph hasn't recovered once #203416 is declared resolved, add your username and the affected date range there — that's the aggregated queue staff are working through.