On Saturday, npm, the chief registry for JavaScript software packages, had lost 97 packages for 30 minutes, including nine popular packages that remained offline for more than three hours, the result of the company’s attempts to deal with spam in the registry, said Npm Inc. Chief Technology Officer CJ Silverio.

Spam is a problem almost as old as the internet itself, but to generally it has not been too much of an issue in software development tooling. Npm, however, has become so successful that it has become a new vector for web spam. The incident differs from the Left-pad disruption last year, in which a package depended on by many had been taken offline by a disgruntled developer.

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