I'm getting 403s when trying to download basic census tract shapefiles. You might have the same problem / if you have regular jobs that rely on public datasets they may start failing randomly.<p>Looks like this might be another victim of the current administration's fun with databases (although I admit that's speculation).
It looks like the census API has been down for at least 8hrs now (according to the time of this Reddit post reporting the issue: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/epidemiology/comments/1ihrmyi/us_census_api_vanished/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/epidemiology/comments/1ihrmyi/us_ce...</a>)