It looks like you created a submodule, pointing to an unreachable remote location.
See this answer. That icon, when green, will point to the sub module. I'm assuming it's greyed out in your case because the sub module was incorrectly configured.
Given that .gitmodules
is not present, it must have been deleted, leaving a sub module without a remote information.
If go into app
and type git remote -v
you will see where this module is pointing too. This place is currently unreachable.
In a similar scenario, I added a submodule and deleted .gitmodules
. The result on GitHub looks like this: