One in seven MCP registry source repos is no longer publicly reachable
mcpindex · reddit · 2026-07-23
1 in 7 MCP registry source repos are no longer publicly reachable
The author of mcpindex ran a census across the official MCP registry and found that 1,830 of 13,105 referenced GitHub repos are not publicly accessible anymore — about one in seven.
Method
- Checked every repo from two independent vantage points: authenticated GitHub API from a datacenter IP and the unauthenticated web UI from a home IP.
- Counted a repo only if both checks agreed it was unreachable.
- Required the failure to persist 48 hours apart, so temporary outages would not count.
- Timestamped the measurement to Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps for verifiability.
Why it matters
- Anonymous git ls-remote against a deleted/private repo returns a 401 credential prompt, not a 404.
- That means tools relying on anonymous git can misclassify dead repos as generic errors and miss the problem entirely.
- The author notes a key limitation: 404 cannot distinguish deleted vs intentionally privatized repos, so the result is “not publicly accessible,” not necessarily “abandoned.”
Report and dataset:
- Method/report: https://mcpindex.ai/research/source-liveness
- Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21501868
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