Transcript
[A tower of blocks is shown. The upper half consists of many tiny blocks balanced on top of one another to form smaller towers, labeled:]
All modern digital infrastructure
[The blocks rest on larger blocks lower down in the image, finally on a single large block. This is balanced on top of a set of blocks on the left, and on the right, a single tiny block placed on its side. This one is labeled:]
A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003
I always thought it was this event that broke the internet a bit until it was resolved. However it's hardly the only example of open source dependency on individual programmer projects, as detailed in the Explain XKCD.
It's another example of not making assumptions in your code, and having any part of the process break gracefully when things don't work like they should. But of course every programmer writes like that... right? cough
Wow, I thought this comic was much older than that NPM debacle. But according to Explain XKCD, the comic was published in 2020. Not sure why XKCD itself does not seem to display the date.
That story is hilarious in retrospect considering the shallow husk of a platform Kik has become. I don't think anyone actually even maintains it anymore.