Thank you, that's actually very important information. So it wasn't taken down, it was just set to private:

> the repository has been made private (only contributors will be able to access the repo for now)

Huge difference and imho quite ok until things are clear.

Well, from the owner's perspective, it was marked private, without any additional communication.

From a visitor's perspective, it just became a 404 page, also without explanation, so effectively taken down.

I understand taken down as removed, but I can see that one could also define it as "unavailable".

From a site visitor's perspective, what is the difference?