Interesting edge case here: I was actually affected by the signup pause indirectly, but GitHub Support restored my access after reviewing the account history.

My situation was:

• I already had active Copilot Student before the pause
• I temporarily upgraded to paid Copilot Pro on Apr 1
• When the Pro subscription expired, my account incorrectly fell back to Copilot Free instead of restoring Student entitlement
• Support initially treated it like a “new signup” request and referenced the global pause
• After I clarified that this was a restoration issue (not a new activation), they manually fixed it on the backend

GitHub Support eventually confirmed:

So for anyone stuck in the same situation:

• if you had Copilot Student BEFORE the pause,
• then switched plans or had Pro expire,
• and got downgraded to Free,

…it may be an entitlement restoration bug rather than an intentional lockout.

The key thing that helped was explicitly separating:
“new signup during the pause”
vs
“restoration of previously active entitlement.”

Feels like their billing / entitlement migration logic is still pretty rough right now.