[Hub] 403 when trying to download models
Cross-posting from https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/issues/1297 as I'm not sure if this is an issue with the `SentenceTransformers` library or with the model hub directly.

Similar to the author of the linked post, we are also running into this both locally and from CI, so it doesn't seem to be one particular blocked or rate-limited IP. Interestingly enough, I am not running into this issue when using `huggingface/transformers` directly, but only when it's wrapped through `SentenceTransformers`. 
Update: The original author found that the [same error also occurs on non SBERT-related activity](https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/issues/1297#issuecomment-986724370), suggesting that it is indeed an issue on the model hub directly.

Thanks in advance for timely investigation and fix, as I assume this is blocking a lot of users at the moment :) <|||||>We're also affected, our `all-MiniLM-L6-v2` model is not working in production. Are there any workarounds? How can we download them manually and load them locally instead?<|||||>In case this helps with the investigation, I can also reproduce this in the browser:

- This page works fine: https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/clip-ViT-B-32/tree/afe976e3f4ea04b633edb0089a7e5088ddbe9212
- When I now click on `.gitattributes`, I am directed to a page that returns `403`: https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/clip-ViT-B-32/blob/afe976e3f4ea04b633edb0089a7e5088ddbe9212/.gitattributes (Update: It's not really specific to `.gitattributes`, it's any files, the file with the leading dot just happens to be the first that is checked)<|||||>@hfjallemark 
You can download all models from here:
https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/reimers/sentence-transformers/v0.2/

Unzip them to a path and load from disc.

We currently look into this<|||||>Thanks @nreimers -- managed to do that and load locally.<|||||>> We currently look into this

Thanks @nreimers for the quick response. If there is any way we can help, do let us know!<|||||>Same here with `stsb-distilbert-base`
Digging in code, found that server says model should contain files [".gitattributes", "README.md"] which are 403
Ugly workaround - just skip them by adding at `site-packages/sentence_transformers/util.py`@434 (`snapshot_download` func, loop over `.sublings`) smth like
```
if model_file.rfilename in [".gitattributes", "README.md"]:
      print("[adhoc hack] Skip ", model_file.rfilename)
```

Hope you will fix that <|||||>The download from the hub should be working again.

Let me know if you still have issues.<|||||>I can confirm that the download works again. Thanks to you and everyone on the team for the quick action! <|||||>Post-mortem: AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) had a new ruleset merged today (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/aws-managed-rule-groups-list.html) that didn't like our URL structure