We started getting 503s from github at around 5am this morning, from our fresh ping.
Restarting the dokku app fixed the issue.
It wasn't all urls (e.g. /info/refs seemed to work), but we couldn't checkout via the proxy until we restarted.
Possibly the connection got in a stuck state. We could maybe try using http/1.0 rather than http/1.1 if this happens again.