In a situation where Github API calls are exhausted (rate limited), Github plugin will claim to have set a git commit status when it was unable to. 

In such a scenario, using "Set GitHub commit status (universal)" as Post build action, a status line such as this will be printed out to the console of the affected build:

[Set GitHub commit status (universal)] SUCCESS on repos [] (sha:bfc5a2c) with context: <project_name_redacted>

On a build where the API calls are not exhausted, it should look more like this. 

[Set GitHub commit status (universal)] SUCCESS on repos [GHRepository@1234abc [<should>, <be>, <lots>, <of>, <data>, <here>]] (sha:bfc5a2c) with context: <project_name_redacted>

The issue appears to be that this line:
https://github.com/jenkinsci/github-plugin/blob/51dc96b336818b6df56bb85ec91fa384fe55ab86/src/main/java/org/jenkinsci/plugins/github/status/GitHubCommitStatusSetter.java#L136

doesn't care if it gets an empty list back.

Somewhere we should raise an error rather than silently failing due to API rate limiting.