Build fails with "Host key verification failed" (exit 128) even after full unlink/relink of GitHub repo

Hi, I’m having trouble deploying my site and could use some help investigating server-side logs.

Site name: talkingflow-cl
Repository: breeze3003-hash/TalkingFlow-CL (private, personal account, not an org)
Branch: main

Error (fails during “preparing repo” stage):
Host key verification failed.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the repository exists.
: exit status 128

What I’ve already checked/tried:

  • Confirmed the branch is exactly “main” on GitHub
  • Confirmed the Netlify GitHub App has “All repositories” access under GitHub → Settings → Installed GitHub Apps → Netlify
  • Fully unlinked and relinked the repository via Project configuration → Build & deploy → Continuous deployment → Manage repository → Unlink, then Link to an existing repository
  • Confirmed there are no webhooks at all on the repo (Settings → Webhooks is empty), so it’s not a duplicate webhook issue
  • Confirmed breeze3003-hash is a personal account, not an organization, so the “org-owned private repo on Starter plan” restriction doesn’t apply
  • Retried the deploy multiple times, same error every time

This is a Vite/vanilla JS PWA project with a netlify/functions folder for serverless functions (OpenAI API calls).

Since I’ve ruled out all the common causes listed in the docs, I suspect this might be a stuck/inconsistent state on Netlify’s backend for this specific site. Could someone from the support team take a look at the internal build logs?

Thanks in advance!

I also starting to get this out of the blue

Third report here, same failure. Started around 19:58 CDT.

Site: startling-dieffenbachia-ec65cc (livepoll.io)
Repo: livepoll-tech/livepoll (private, org-owned), branch master

A deploy from the same repo and branch succeeded normally at 17:16 today with no config changes in between, so this appeared out of nowhere. Five failures since: 19:58, 20:01 without cache, 20:04, and 20:14 after relinking.

One detail that may help narrow it down: the clone is attempted over HTTPS but fails with an SSH host key error, which shouldn’t happen since an HTTPS clone doesn’t verify host keys.

git clone --filter=blob:none https://github.com/livepoll-tech/livepoll
Cloning into ‘/opt/build/repo’…
Host key verification failed.

One attempt failed even earlier than the clone, at “User git error while checking for ref refs/heads/master.”

Also ruled out on my side: no submodules, GitHub App installed and scoped to this repo with read access to code and metadata, no pending permission approval, repo relinked with no effect.

Note that this affects both personal and org-owned repos, since the original report is a personal account and mine is an org.

Workaround for anyone blocked: netlify deploy --prod --dir=dist --no-build publishes a locally built directory and skips the clone entirely. Got our site out while this is open.

it appears that there’s some disruption in the github action as well.. not really sure but it might be correlated to that disruption