Los Angeles, CA - Supply chain issues have been on the minds of shoppers everywhere in the US this holiday season. Demand shocks have hit markets around the world as businesses and economies more broadly have opened up after a prolonged slowdown brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. Consumers have seen delivery times and prices increase and many Christmas gifts will arrive days or weeks into the new year. But even as the holidays wind down and Black Friday and Cyber Week have long come and gone, supply chain issues persist - even digital ones.
According to a recent internal study at Github obtained by unicorn.computer, 63% of NPM packages are stuck waiting in data centers near the Port of Long Beach. The study says "many downloads requested up to 2 months ago are still queued and may not be delivered until well into the new year." Package downloads for all programming languages have been impacted, but especially from the NPM registry. The study noted widespread frustration amongst engineers. One was quoated as saying:
"I'm working on this really complex project. I have Kubernetes set up and running multi-region and across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Anyways, it's this personal blog of mine and all I want to do is download 15GB of JavaScript so I can run my site. I'm so close to getting a "Hello World" page up now — this backlog is killing me"
The internal Github study didn't offer and concrete solutions to the problem, but did recommend that engineers "use the platform" where possible.