GitHub repo error: Cannot retrieve the latest commit at this time

Question

I've found similar questions asked elsewhere, but none seem to address my problem. I created this repo a few days ago:

https://github.com/jeanluct/adcell

Since then I've been getting a "Cannot retrieve the latest commit at this time", which is preventing the image in my README.md from loading. All other operations work just fine: cloning, pushing, looking at history, etc. I tried two browsers and asked friends to look, and they see the same error. A very weird part of this is that the error does not appear on my phone. (I saw no disruption in GitHub's status that would indicate that this is a temporary problem. It's been about 4 days.)

I tried creating a different project adcell2, and it worked fine (without error). I deleted the original and renamed adcell2 to adcell, and the error came back!

At this point I'll probably leave it alone if there's no fix. I'm loath to rename the project since I've already sent the link to my students and others. But I was curious to see if anyone has encountered this strange behavior previously.

Many thanks,

J-LT

Answer 1

I contacted GitHub support as suggested by bk2204. They responded quite rapidly (thanks!) and suggested turning off the ad-blocker. That did the trick!

I guess all the people I asked to look at it also used an ad-blocker. Still strange that it only does it for this one repository.

Update: the support person suggested that it's probably because the repo name starts with 'ad'! Though she wasn't sure why 'adcell2' had worked.

Answer 2

This issue, if you're seeing it, is likely some problem on GitHub's end. It could be that your repo is triggering a timeout in some code path that's preventing it from loading properly, or there could be some otherwise harmless issue.

If it's important to you, you should write into GitHub Support, and someone will look into it.