TIL a man deleted his open source Javascript package from npm in 2016 and inadvertently caused service disruptions across the internet as the eleven lines of code were a dependency of many major software projects

A developer named Azer Koçulu has been in a dispute with messenger service Kik over his use of the name “kik” for one of his packages.

NPM has a policy in place for naming disputes such as this. In disputes like this, existing programs can still find them without needing to be altered.

Because the code was open-source, another coder republished an identical, new version (1.0.0) within minutes. But a lot of other software relied on left-pad to work.