popular content and referral content data missing from 4 weeks

[CICD-pic-avr-github-admin]

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Hi,

The traffic insights stopped displaying the popular content and the referal content data. Please help to fix this asap
Attached the details for reference

Also unable to fetch data from the library functions or api calls.

[sinavm]

Hi
Thanks for reaching out and sharing the screenshot super helpful for context! I totally get how frustrating it can be when insights aren’t showing up as expected, especially when you’re trying to track engagement on the repo. Let me break this down and help troubleshoot/fix where I can.
On the Traffic Insights (Referring Sites & Popular Content)
From the warning message in your screenshot (“Referring sites and popular content are temporarily unavailable or may not display accurately”), this looks like a site-wide GitHub issue rather than something specific to this repo. It’s tied to an ongoing backend update on GitHub’s end for their traffic analytics system, and it’s been popping up for a lot of users recently (I’ve seen similar reports in the community forums). 
The good news? GitHub’s actively working on it, and these sections usually start populating again within a day or two once the update rolls out.
In the meantime, here’s what we know about how this data works:
• Clones and basic visitors (which are showing in your graph) update hourly.
• Referring sites and Popular content update daily, and they need at least a week’s worth of traffic data to show anything meaningful.  If the repo is brand new or has low traffic (like the 94 views/12 unique visitors over 14 days here), they might stay empty even after the fix.
• Quick checks to try:
• Ensure the repo is public (private repos have limited insights).
• Wait 24-48 hours and refresh—data can lag.
• If it’s been over a week with steady traffic and still nothing, flag it directly to GitHub support via their contact form with your repo URL.
Your graphs for clones and visitors look solid otherwise—nice steady activity there! If this persists post-update, we can dig deeper.
On Library Functions/API Calls Not Fetching Data
This sounds separate and potentially more repo-specific. The screenshot doesn’t show code, so I’m assuming this is about issues pulling data from GitHub’s API (e.g., via Octokit or similar) in your project’s library functions, or maybe internal fetches failing. Could you clarify a bit?
• What exact error are you seeing (e.g., 404, auth failure, rate limit)?
• Which API endpoints or library methods are failing (e.g., /repos/{owner}/{repo}/traffic/clones)?
• Any recent changes to auth tokens, scopes, or network setup?
In the short term:
• Double-check your GitHub token has the right scopes (repo for private, or public_repo for public).
• Test a simple curl: curl -H "Authorization: token YOUR_TOKEN" https://api.github.com/repos/adobe-acrobat/pic161746-cold-plate-mpl-mc/traffic/clones (replace with your token/repo).

• If it’s rate-limiting, GitHub’s unauth limit is 60 req/hour—consider exponential backoff in code.
If you can share a minimal code snippet or error log (feel free to redact sensitive bits), I can repro and suggest a patch. Worst case, this might tie back to the same backend hiccup affecting insights.
Hang tight—I’ll keep an eye on the GitHub status page (githubstatus.com) and update here if I hear more. In the meantime, if this is blocking something urgent, let me know how else I can assist!
Best,
@sinavm

[mjtolentino]

I'm having this same issue. I put a post on stack overflow about as well, but I'll post some info here too

• My data stopped updating 2025-08-20
• I have no issues accessing clones and views data from the traffic endpoint, just the referral sources and referral paths
• The repo is four years old and previously had around about 200 hits/100 uniques for each 2 week period
• I have checked, my PAT has Read access to metadata and Read and Write access to actions, administration, code, commit statuses, custom properties for repositories, deployments, discussions, issues, merge queues, pull requests, and workflows.
• I confirmed that I have write access to the repo with the repo owner
• I have been troubleshooting this for a week and have been googling the repo to visit so I know there are referrals to it
• I'm not seeing an error, I have a 200 response, it just returns an empty list
• There is no rate limit for this end point, it only ever returns a list of 14 items
• There have been no changes on our side
• cURL calls succeed to all endpoints but /repos/{owner}/{repo}/traffic/popular/referrers

Code snippets

I'm anonymizing most of this, but this is python code I'm using.

>>> from github import Auth, Github
>>> auth = Auth.Token('MY_TOKEN')
>>> g = Github(auth=auth)
>>> repo = g.get_repo('owner/repo')
>>> contents = repo.get_top_referrers()
>>> contents
[]
>>> repo.get_views_traffic(per="week")
View(uniques=254, count=1905)

The call to get views using pygithub doesn't return the breakdown in the documentation. I also confirmed I saw results with repo.get_issues().

If I use requests instead

>>> import requests
>>> url = f'https://api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo_name}/traffic/popular/referrers'
>>> params = {}
>>> auth = ('token', 'MY_TOKEN')
>>> headers = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Accept': 'application/vnd.github+json',
    'X-GitHub-Api-Version': '2022-11-28',
}
>>> response = requests.get(url, params=params, headers=headers, timeout=10)
>>> response
<Response [200]>
>>> response.json()
[]

It also returns an empty list when I try using cURL. Looking at the headers I see HTTP/2 200, so I know I successfully authenticated.

>>> curl -L \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer MY_TOKEN" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/OWNER/REPO/traffic/popular/referrers

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