A ton of old accounts that never selected a custom skin seem to have had their skin changed today. According to NameMC, the account "Boy" changed its skin on 11/2 from Steve to an Alex template skin. The account always had the default Steve skin, as it had never had a custom skin prior to this date, however it seems it was force-changed to the Alex template. Other accounts that were changed include hey, API, Alex, boy, girl, X, 00, Yes, ddd, 555, C8 - most of those changed today, either from Steve (based on Java HashCode of UUID) to Alex (custom set), or from Alex (based on Java HashCode of UUID) to Steve (custom set), or from the default HashCode skin they have to the same skin, except custom-set... it's very odd. those are just names I thought of to check... I'm sure there are plenty more.
I know someone with an old account, that never set a custom skin, and his skin suddenly changed from the default Steve he had based on the Java HashCode of his UUID to an Alex template skin today as well.
I don't know what's causing this but accounts shouldn't normally have their skins forcefully changed, so I'm reporting it as a bug. Hopefully this is fixed soon and accounts will get their normal Steve/Alex default skins back depending on their UUID HashCode.
Hi, as you observed, we are now returning the default skin from the API. We can confirm there was an issue in the algorithm deciding the default skin. A fix for this has been deployed since yesterday, 2020-11-05 around 16:00 UTC and the default skins returned by the API are now expected to correspond to the same default skin determined by the Java HashCode of UUID.