Github requires referer header field to login

So I’ve had this happen for some time now and could not determine the perpetrator as it was happening not really too often. From time to time I would encounter a error when trying to Login to Github:

Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later.

In many cases this was related to something using oAuth but not in mine. I simply wanted to login to Github as usual.

So after some trial and error, I’ve noticed that disabling the “Referer Control” extension in chrome or chromium would solve the issue. My guess is they simply use that to prevent XSRF attacks.

Solution: Add an exception in the settings for Github as shown below

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Kordian Bruck

I'm a TUM Computer Science Alumni. Pizza enthusiast. Passionate for SRE, beautiful Code and Club Mate. Currently working as an SRE at Google. Opinions and statements in this blog post are my own.

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