The image shows a row of electrical circuit breakers with wooden letter blocks placed on top of each breaker. The blocks spell out the phrase

Imagine this: You wake up in the morning, open your IDE, and run "composer install" to start your workday, but nothing happens. Packagist is down. It's not just slow, it's completely offline.

No big deal, right? Just a temporary glitch. But then you check your social networks. NPM is down too. Maven Central? Offline. PyPI? Gone. Crates.io? Vanished.

It seems the world's package registries have gone on strike.

Day Zero: This is fine🔥

The first casualty is your CI/CD pipeline. Every build fails. Deployments freeze. Container images won't build. Your colleagues start to panic in the chat room. "Just use the cache", someone suggests. Sure, if only you had remembered to cache everything! But what about that new microservice you started working on yesterday? Dead in the water.

By noon, Reddit and Stack Overflow are flooded with developers desperately seeking workarounds. GitHub is inundated with tickets bearing subject lines like "URGENT: Cannot install dependencies". Your product manager asks when the hotfix will be deployed. You laugh nervously.

The Week After: Realization hits

Now it's getting serious. Remember that e-commerce site processing millions daily? It's down because they can't deploy security patches. The bank's new feature release? Postponed indefinitely. The start-up racing to meet their funding milestone? Watching their engineering team sit idle as their runway bleeds.

Conservative estimates put the cost of IT downtime at thousands of dollars per minute and hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour. For large enterprises, we're talking about millions of dollars per hour. But this isn't just one company; it's the entire software industry grinding to a halt simultaneously.

28 Days Later: Welcome to the apocalypse

The global economy is currently in free fall. Remember, we're talking about infrastructure that facilitates billions of downloads every month:

The math is staggering. Modern applications are built using over 80% open-source components. Without open source and package registries, companies would need to spend 3.5 times their current software budgets to replicate these capabilities. Harvard researchers estimated the demand-side value of open source software to be $8.8 trillion. Yes, with a "T".

The bitter irony

Here is the kicker: these critical pieces of infrastructure, which form the literal foundation of trillion-dollar industries, are operating on goodwill, volunteers' time, and a shoestring budget.

Packagist? Is funded primarily by Private Packagist customer subscriptions and a small group of direct infrastructure sponsors. The vast majority of high-volume corporate users? They consume without contributing. The situation is similar for the other package registries.

These aren't well-funded corporate projects with large teams. They're maintained by small groups who are burning out while billion-dollar corporations extract billions in value.

The corporate free lunch

To be brutally honest, commercial-scale use without commercial-scale support is unsustainable.

The entire tech stack of your Fortune 500 company, the platform generating millions in revenue, depends on infrastructure maintained by non-profits that are barely getting by on donations. Your CI/CD pipeline accesses these package registries thousands of times a day. Your security scanners crawl them continuously. Your container builds pull gigabytes of dependencies.

What is the cost of running this infrastructure? Real servers, real bandwidth, real engineers on call 24/7, real security audits, and real compliance work. The EU's Cyber Resilience Act alone introduces significant new regulatory requirements.

Meanwhile, enterprises save millions annually by using open-source Java alone. Total annual savings from open source? Conservatively estimated at $100 billion. Some estimate the value at $8.8 trillion.

And what about the investment back into this infrastructure? Laughably inadequate. Billion-dollar ecosystems are built on foundations of goodwill and unpaid weekends.

The wake-up call

The joint statement released by OpenSSF, Packagist, Maven Central, PyPI, crates.io and others is not hyperbole. It's a desperate plea: this system is breaking down.

When maintainers burn out, projects are abandoned. Security vulnerabilities pile up. Critical infrastructure becomes unstable. We've all seen the chaos that ensues when a single package like left-pad or colors.js breaks, affecting thousands of projects.

Now imagine them all going dark. For a day. A week. A month.

What needs to change

The ask isn't unreasonable:

  • Developers: Implement proper caching in CI/CD. Stop wasteful usage patterns.
  • Enterprises: Budget for infrastructure support. If you're saving millions on open source, invest thousands back.
  • Tool builders: Design with infrastructure impact in mind. Enable caching by default, for example.
  • Everyone: Recognize that "free" infrastructure isn't free: someone is paying the cost.

We have built a trillion-dollar global software industry on the backs of underfunded volunteers and non-profits. We have normalised the idea that critical infrastructure should be "free" while corporations extract enormous value.

Right now, every "composer install", "npm install", and "cargo build" is an act of generosity that subsidises corporate profit margins.

And, at this scale, generosity is not a business model.

The more likely scenario

That one-month strike? It would never happen. These maintainers care too much; they're too committed to keeping things running. But maybe that's the problem. Perhaps the industry needs to experience the consequences before it acknowledges its debt.

For open source projects and package registries to function efficiently, they rely heavily on US infrastructure providers such as GitHub, Azure, AWS and EC2. This means that we rely on foreign platforms for essential aspects of our software development processes.

If we were suddenly cut off from these US services due to geopolitical tensions, cybersecurity incidents or regulatory disagreements, for example, this would have serious consequences for digital sovereignty and economic stability across the continent.

This scenario underscores the urgent need to invest in sovereign European infrastructure and domestic solutions, ensuring long-term technological independence and resilience in an increasingly turbulent world.