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NPM Fails Worldwide With 'ERR! 418 I'm a Teapot' Error (bleepingcomputer.com)
Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Users of the NPM JavaScript package manager were greeted by a weird error yesterday evening, as their consoles and applications spewed a message of "ERR! 418 I'm a teapot" whenever they tried to update or install a new JavaScript/Node.js package. JavaScript developers from all over the world received the error, and not just in certain geographical regions. The bug did not affect all users, but only those behind a proxy server.
There was zero response (that I could see) from the NPM team until a maintainer locked the thread and chided commenters for repeating that they too were receiving the error. This is the third or fourth time there's been a major issue that screws people relying on npm, and if the team hasn't fixed the process by now, it might be good to find a different team that can.
Yet it's used directly by millions of people every day and with major applications. This is the problem with these hosted javascript scripts that people plug into their websites willy nilly. They are a shitshow where someone could gain access and plug malware into millions of websites and is a single point of failure. Not even going to touch the shitty programming parent alludes too. Anyone thinking of using this shit should pull copies and check it for security and code quality and host it on their own servers rather than just point to the script and load it dynamically.
But that would be hard and who cares if it's hard. Funny thing is we just went through this a couple months ago when one of these major scripts hosting went down and it disabled 1/4 of the internet. You'd think people would learn from that.