The vcs system was suffering from a system overload. Caused by a DDos? Caused by an overload of normal usage? It was impossible to tell. The FSF admins were aware of the problem and were working to address the issue. After an hour of tinkering the server became usable again. I wish I could say it was some specific problem but in the end after working through multiple overload issues the overload stopped. Upgrading the servers has been a long discussed topic.
See the out of band status information page for up to the moment status information. https://pumprock.net/fsfstatus It may not be obvious to people but all of the version control services (git, svn, cvs, hg, bzr, viewcvs, cgit, and so forth) all live on the same vcs server. Therefore when the server is overloaded all vcs services are affected. Bob
