GitHub Enterprise for Education license expired again, and our university is completely blocked

[petrosandreou]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

We are using GitHub Enterprise Server for Education at Unicaf.

Our license expired 5 days ago, and as a result our self-hosted GitHub Enterprise instance has stopped working. This has blocked our teams from accessing repositories, issues, pull requests, and the development workflows we depend on every day.

What makes this situation even more unacceptable is that the same issue happened last year. At that time, we were assured that this would not happen again and that the license renewal would be handled automatically for the following year.

That did not happen.

We have already contacted GitHub Support, but so far we have not received the support needed to resolve this critical issue. For a university relying on GitHub Enterprise for daily academic and operational work, this is a disaster.

GitHub promotes support for education, universities, and students, but situations like this create the impression that educational institutions are not treated with the urgency given to paid enterprise customers.

We urgently need GitHub to:

1. Renew our GitHub Enterprise Server for Education license immediately.
2. Explain why the promised automatic renewal failed.
3. Provide a reliable process so this does not happen again next year.

This is not a minor inconvenience. It has stopped critical work across our organization.

We need immediate escalation and resolution.

Regards

Petros Andreou
Director of Cloud Operations

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[Ph4ntomic]

[petrosandreou]

Thanks for the "break-glass" suggestion, but that is not the point here.

Yes, we know how Git works.
Yes, we know how repositories work.
And yes, we understand that a self-hosted GitHub Enterprise Server does not magically erase our Git data because a license expired.

But we are not running GitHub Enterprise just as a fancy folder of bare repositories.

We also have thousands of issues, tickets, projects, pull requests, reviews, permissions, workflows, wikis and operaional history inside GitHub.

And yes, before someone suggests it, we also know that some of this data may still be accessible through APIs or backend access despite the lockout.

But the solution cannot be: Build an emergency replacement platform, extract everything, recreate workflows, migrate teams to a temporary system, and hope support eventually replies.

That is not a serious answer for a university depending on GitHub Enterprise for daily operations.

The point is simple:

GitHub’s education license renewal process failed, and support has not handled it with the urgency this situation requires.

We are not asking for a survival guide.

We are asking GitHub to properly support the education customers it claims to support

Thanks