Unpkg, a content delivery network (CDN) that powers more than 4 billion requests per day, went down for several hours on Friday morning. The outage broke the thousands of websites that use the open-source CDN, leaving developers scrambling for a fix.
A popular open-source content delivery network went down for hours
An Unpkg CDN outage briefly broke thousands of websites.
An Unpkg CDN outage briefly broke thousands of websites.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
The outage appeared to have started around 4AM ET, with sites returning a 520 error from Cloudflare, which powers Unpkg. Many developers affected by the outage switched to jsDelivr, another open-source CDN for GitHub and the package manager npm, in order to keep their sites online. Unpkg started coming back online at around 9AM ET. That’s when Fly.io — the service that Unpkg’s origin server uses to provide auto-scaling infrastructure — announced that it “deployed a fix” to recover affected sites.
Even though the outage was resolved within hours, it marks yet another example of how fragile the volunteer-led coding ecosystem is. In late March, a developer discovered a malicious backdoor in the data compression tool XZ Utils. Popular Linux distributions, such as Red Hat and Debian, incorporate the tool, leaving a ton of systems at risk. Fortunately, the flaw was uncovered before the bad actor could carry out a massive cyberattack.
Much of the web is dependent on open-source projects run by developers who don’t even get paid. So, if you know an open-source dev, maybe treat them to a cup of coffee today.
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