If you’re like me, you were probably wondering why many the websites you were visiting today were grinding to a near halt. More than once I happened to notice that my browser status bar kept saying “waiting for unpkg.com…”, so I figured that had to be the problem.
Twitter seems to concur…
Unpkg .com is a widely-used content delivery network (CDN) that hosts some of the most popular JavaScript libraries on the web, including big hitters like React, jQuery, and Bootstrap. Many websites take advantage of these libraries to improve their performance and reduce the strain on their servers, and they rely on unpkg to serve these files quickly and efficiently.
But if unpkg .com were to go down, the consequences would be wide ranging and dire. Without access to these ubiquitous JavaScript libraries, many websites would suffer from slower load times, broken functionality, and even crashes.
Further, website builders and content management systems often use unpkg .com as a default CDN for their JavaScript libraries. This means that inumerable websites could be impacted by an outage, leading to cascading failures across the internet – which is what we’re seeing today.
This illustrates the bane of web ops: single-point-of-failures. Something we obsess
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