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: https://www.reddit.com/r/epidemiology/comments/1ihrmyi/us_ce...)
Can confirm it’s giving a “Forbidden” error when trying to download any data layer or section of the census
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.
Looks like this might be another victim of the current administration's fun with databases (although I admit that's speculation).