The left-pad incident is the npm outage every JavaScript developer has heard of and few have read the paperwork for. On March 22, 2016, one developer unpublished 273 packages from npm, one of them an eleven-line function called left-pad, and builds of Babel, Atom and "many thousands of projects" started failing at "hundreds of failures per minute", in npm's own words . It took two and a half hours and an unprecedented restore from backup to fix. The mechanism behind it, transitive dependencies ...