As others suggested, any serious deployment should be hosting their own registry / mirror or using a paid service. This also saves you in cases such as the left

As others suggested, any serious deployment should be hosting their own registry / mirror or using a paid service. This also saves you in cases such as the left-pad issue, as your mirror would still have the package. It is unwise to rely on free third-party services which are out of your control, especially for something as important as deployment! This problem is not limited to npm. I remember a few years back there were similar issues with RubyGems, where it'd go down leaving many developers unable to deploy. Heck, how many projects do you think would be left unable to deploy if GitHub went down? I remember a few years back they'd have their occasional issues and Twitter would become a storm of angry developers. For many projects not being able to deploy or develop at any moment, as well as dealing with left-pad style issues is implicitly accepted as a reasonable trade-off.