Since yesterday a lot of users in Europe found their workflows failing due to Github seemingly randomly throwing HTTP/401 on git clone/git pull when interacting with public repos without authentication.
It was now confirmed by staff member that this indeed is intentional and no further steps are planned at this point.
You can only publish packages via github, so it’s not a surprise, IMO. I don’t know why they did that in the first place instead of using email like every normal service.