
Npm was down - gingerrr
http://www.npmjs.org
======
seldo
Our sincere apologies for tonight's downtime. We're back up now after 30
incredibly frustrating minutes, but we're making changes to ensure this
incident can't be repeated.

The root cause was a network failure at our CDN, Fastly. The incident was
limited to a single Point of Presence (POP) in San Jose, so if you were in
Europe or Asia you didn't see anything wrong, but obviously at this time of
day most traffic is from the west coast.

While our uptime over the last few months has been pretty great, in the last
week we've had two non-trivial incidents. That's unacceptable to our users,
and to us, and we're not just sitting around hoping it doesn't happen again,
but will be making fundamental architectural changes to eliminate the sources
of failure we've seen.

~~~
bjornstar
I'm in Tokyo and it was definitely down for me and now it's down again.

~~~
peterbraden
I'm in Zurich and it was also down here.

~~~
seldo
Yes, we had another 20 minutes of downtime 4 hours later, caused by our CDN
accidentally re-instating their broken datacenter. The second outage is
documented here:
[http://status.npmjs.org/incidents/jc65gc8tzk5v](http://status.npmjs.org/incidents/jc65gc8tzk5v)

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peterwwillis
Mirrors, anyone? CPAN has like 50,000,000 mirrors. NPM could get at least
three.

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mrmondo
Has to be one of the more unreliable of the million package managers out
there.

Good thing our devs all rely on this for successful app builds...

~~~
te_chris
At least you know there's a whole bunch of venture money behind them....

------
paulirish
Outage status pages:

NPM:
[http://status.npmjs.org/incidents/nz0kw54kdvfq](http://status.npmjs.org/incidents/nz0kw54kdvfq)

Fastly:
[http://status.fastly.com/incidents/381z6ydt7ddb](http://status.fastly.com/incidents/381z6ydt7ddb)

~~~
mrmondo
Thanks for the link thats very helpful. It would be nice if they had this in
their error logs.

------
farslan
One reason where Go's lazy approach is wonderful. It doesn't need to depend to
any centralized server.

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cellis
Use this: npm --registry
[http://registry.npmjs.eu/](http://registry.npmjs.eu/)

~~~
xtrumanx
Is it possible to point to a folder containing the packages instead?

I noticed every package installed is cached locally and since I'm usually
reinstalling the same packages it would be great if I could point to a folder
and let npm install packages and their dependencies from there. Extra points
if it could fallback to the official registry if it fails to find a package in
the local folder.

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pbadger2
I'd be more surprised if you had posted that NPM was up.

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leichtgewicht
The reason for the comfort of Node is imho. NPM and the way it easily gives
you fast access to a lot of functionality. That being said it is worrysome
that NPM has the size of 80GB+ as far as I know and mirroring is not quite
that appealing. I wonder what spoke against a repository-list instead URL of a
single-repository URL with fallbacks when they first developed NPM.

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hippich
Does anyone have links where I could read about what I can read about possible
workarounds? Like mirrors may be or setting up private repositories?

~~~
helper
It's easy to setup a private cache to keep your builds going while npm is
down: [http://eng.yammer.com/a-private-npm-
cache/](http://eng.yammer.com/a-private-npm-cache/)

~~~
bhouston
There should be a general backup NPM service somewhere though. Just like there
are with Linux distro package systems. Maybe it could be a few hours behind in
terms of replication, but generally that is good enough for nearly everyone.

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karangoeluw
Just when I wanted to get some work done.

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krsunny
Guru Meditation?!?

~~~
antoncohen
"Guru Meditation" is part of a default error message in Varnish, a caching
HTTP proxy. Fastly (NPM's CDN) uses Varnish.

The Guru Meditation error originated with Amiga:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation)

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thenerdfiles
npm_lazy to the rescue!

