That was due to the recent Cloudflare outage. GitLab is usually super reliable, but sometimes things happen outside anyone’s control. Having a backup you can restore — even cross-platform to GitHub, Azure DevOps, or Bitbucket — can be a real lifesaver if your team wants to keep going without waiting. Tools like GitProtect make it easy to have that kind of flexibility in place.
Unfortunately, such things happen more often than people realize, especially for semi-popular open source projects. You can do a few things about it. One of them is to report to GitHub about your repo being impersonated. Also, you can clarify ownership on GitHub, for example, by adding a note in your README or a dedicated .md file stating which accounts or websites are officially associated with your project