the left-pad incident

programmingweb devops culture

The 2016 incident in which unpublishing an eleven-line package briefly broke builds across the internet.

When the tiny left-pad package was pulled from npm, countless projects that depended on it (directly or deep in their tree) suddenly failed to build. It became the cautionary tale about how much of modern software rests on small, unnoticed dependencies, and the risk that carries.

Also known as: left-pad, leftpad, npm left-pad

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