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Coming from a company that makes infrastructure out of a view layer / vDOM library - I think anyone relying on Vercel has only themselves to blame.

You have no idea how indifferent security officers can be-even when you point out critical issues. The other day, we flagged that a customer’s database had users with excessive privileges. Their only question: “Can this be exploited from the outside?”

No, but most breaches today come from compromised internal accounts that are then used to break everything.

JavaScript living only as a built artifact in an s3 bucket makes for a much simpler life.

Polite reminder as to why Domain Driven Design is super-important. It makes more sense to spend 80% on DDD initially and then only 20% on the code (80-20 rule) vs the other way round. Or you will end up in a clusterfuck like this.

three critical vulns in 12 months is a pattern not a coincidence. the SRP point is sharp - we interview engineers on isolation principles then build platforms that are the opposite of that.

The whole hiring system needs to be eradicated. You get grilled by incompetents, who ask one question, never ask back when you provide something that is debatable, they give zero feedback and then you see what kind of errors these "elitist" engineers make. Burn it to the ground.

[dead]

That report greatly overrates the tendency to default for Vercel for web because among its 2 web projects it mandated one use Next.js and the other one to be a React SPA as well. Obviously those prime Claude towards Vercel. They shouldve had the second project be a non-React web project for diversity.

It's interesting how many of the low-effort vibecoded projects I see posted on reddit are on vercel. It's basically the default.

The other day, I was forcing myself to use Claude Code for a new CRUD React app[1], and by default it excreted a pile of Node JS and NPM dependencies.

So I told something like, "don't use anything node at all", and it immediately rewrote it as a Python backend, and it volunteered that it was minimizing dependencies in how it did that.

[1] only vibe coding as an exercise for a throwaway artifact; I'm not endorsing vibe coding

It's a good point, but I don't think the problem here is Claude. It's how you use it. We need to be guiding developers to not let Claude make decisions for them. It can help guide decisions, but ultimately one must perform the critical thinking to make sure it is the right choice. This is no different than working with any other teammate for that matter.

The thing I can’t stop thinking about is that Ai is accelerating convergence to the mean (I may be misusing that)

The internet does that but it feels different with this

Is that bad? I would think having everyone on the same handful of platforms should make securing them easier (and means those platforms have more budget to to so), and with fewer but bigger incidents there's a safety-of-the-herd aspect - you're unlikely to be the juiciest target on Vercel during the vulnerability window, whereas if the world is scattered across dozens or hundreds of providers that's less so.

I'm not against making agents scapegoats, but this is a problem found among humans as well.

Yeah, I’ve been tracking what devtools different models choose: https://preseason.ai

Interstingly, a recent conversation [1] between Hank Green and security researcher Sherri Davidoff argued the opposite. More GenAI generated code targeted at specific audiences should result in a more resilient ecosystem because of greater diversity. That obviously can't work if they end up using the same 3 frameworks in every application.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6pgZKVcKpw

Yes, this is a genuine problem with AI platforms. It does sometimes feel like they're suspiciously over-promoting certain solutions; to the point that it's not in the AI platform's interest.

I know what it's like being on the opposite side of this as I maintain an open source project which I started almost 15 years ago and has over 6k GitHub stars. It's been thoroughly tested and battle-tested over long periods of time at scale with a variety of projects; but even if I try to use exact sentences from the website documentation in my AI prompt (e.g. Claude), my project will not surface! I have to mention my project directly by name and then it starts praising it and its architecture saying that it meets all the specific requirements I had mentioned earlier. Then I ask the AI why it didn't mention my project before if it's such a good fit. Then it hints at number of mentions in its training data.

It's weird that clearly the LLM knows a LOT about my project and yet it never recommends it even when I design the question intentionally in such a way that it is the perfect fit.

I feel like some companies have been paying people to upvote/like certain answers in AI-responses with the intent that those upvotes/likes would lead to inclusion in the training set for the next cutting-edge model.

It's a hard problem to solve. I hope Anthropic finds a solution because they have a great product and it would be a shame for it to devolve into a free advertising tool for select few tech platforms. Their users (myself included) pay them good money and so they have no reason to pander to vested interests other than their own and that of their customers.

That's only looking at half of the equation.

That lack of diversity also makes patches more universal, and the surface area more limited.

It's so trivial to seed. LLMs are basically the idiots that have fallen for all the SEO slop on Google. Did some travel planning earlier and it was telling me all about extra insurances I need and why my normal insurance doesn't cover X or Y (it does of course).

"Nobody ever got fired for putting their band page on MySpace."

That's the irony of Mythos. It doesn't need to exist. LLM vibe slop has already eroded the security of your average site.

https://x.com/rauchg/status/2045995362499076169

> A Vercel employee got compromised via the breach of an AI platform customer called http://Context.ai that he was using.

> Through a series of maneuvers that escalated from our colleague’s compromised Vercel Google Workspace account, the attacker got further access to Vercel environments.

> We do have a capability however to designate environment variables as “non-sensitive”. Unfortunately, the attacker got further access through their enumeration.

> We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI. They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.

Still no email blast from Vercel alerting users, which is concerning.

The actual app name would be good to have. Understandable they don’t want to throw them under the bus but it’s just delaying taking action by not revealing what app/service this was.

I don’t understand why they can’t just directly name the responsible app as it will come out eventually.

It looks like the app has already been deleted

Idk exactly how to articulate my thoughts here, perhaps someone can chime in and help.

This feels like a natural consequence of the direction web development has been going for the last decade, where it's normalised to wire up many third party solutions together rather than building from more stable foundations. So many moving parts, so many potential points of failure, and as this incident has shown, you are only as secure as your weakest link. Putting your business in the hands of a third party AI tool (which is surely vibe-coded) carries risks.

Is this the direction we want to continue in? Is it really necessary? How much more complex do things need to be before we course-correct?

[flagged]

Seriously. Why am I reading about this here and not via an email? I've been a paying customer for over a year now. My online news aggregator informs me before the actual company itself does?

Via the incident page:

> Environment variables marked as "sensitive" in Vercel are stored in a manner that prevents them from being read, and we currently do not have evidence that those values were accessed. However, if any of your environment variables contain secrets (API keys, tokens, database credentials, signing keys) that were not marked as sensitive, those values should be treated as potentially exposed and rotated as a priority.

https://vercel.com/kb/bulletin/vercel-april-2026-security-in... as of 4:22p ET

Last year Vercel bungled the security response to a vulnerability in Next's middleware. This is nothing new.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448723

https://xcancel.com/javasquip/status/1903480443158298994

Security is hard and there are only three vendors I trust: AWS, Google and IBM ( yes IBM ). Anything else is just asking for trouble.

> The only reason to dramatically overpay for the hosting resources they provide is because you expect them to expertly manage security and stability.

This and because it's so convenient to click some buttons and have your application running. I've stopped being lazy, though. Moved everything from Render to linode. I was paying render $50+/month. Now I'm paying $3-5.

I would never use one of those hosting providers again.

Completely agreed. At minimum they should be advising secret rotation.

The only possibility for that not being a reasonable starting point is if they think the malicious actors still have access and will just exfiltrate rotated secrets as well. Otherwise this is deflection in an attempt to salvage credibility.

Yeah, given there insane pricing I think the expectations can be higher. Although I know it is impossible to provide 100% secure system, but if something like that happens, then the communication should at least be better. Don’t wait until you have talked to the lawyers... inform your customers first, ideally without this cooperate BS speak, most vercel customers are probably developers, so they understand that incidents like this can happen, just be transparent about it

Welcome to the show.

While a different kind of incident (in hindsight), the other week Webflow had a serious operational incident.

Sites across the globe going down (no clue if all or just a part of them). They posted plenty of messages, I think for about 12 hours, but mostly with the same content/message: "working on fixing this with an upstream provider" (paraphrased). No meaningful info about what was the actual problem or impact.

Only the next day did somebody write about what happened. Essentially a database running out of storage space. How that became a single point of failure, to at least plenty of customers: no clue. Sounds like bad architecture to me though. But what personally rubbed me the wrong way most of all, was the insistence on their "dashboard" having indicated anything wrong with their database deployment, as it allegedly had misrepresented the used/allocated storage. I don't who this upstream service provider of Webflow is, but I know plenty about server maintenance.

Either that upstream provider didn't provide a crucial metric (on-disk storage use) on their "dashboard", or Webflow was throwing this provider under the bus for what may have been their own ignorant/incompetent database server management. I guess it all depends to which extend this database was a managed service or something Webflow had more direct control over. Either way, with any clue about the provider or service missing from their post-mortem, customers can only guess as to who was to blame for the outage.

I have a feeling that we probably aren't the only customer they lost over this. Which in our case would probably not have happened, if they had communicated things in a different way. For context: I personally would never need nor recommend something like Webflow, but I do understand why it might be the right fit for people in a different position. That is, as long as it doesn't break down like it did. I still can't quite wrap my head around that apparent single point of failure for a company the size of Webflow though.

/anecdote

I wonder which tool that is

I dunno. If I work on GitHub and I say “obscure subsystem X” has been breached, it’s no more useful than the level of specificity that Vercel has already given (“some customer environments have been compromised”)

> Vercel’s internal OAuth configurations appear to have allowed this action to grant these broad permissions in Vercel’s enterprise Google Workspace.

This was an interesting tidbit too. If true, this means that Vercel’s IT/Infosec maybe didn’t bother enabling the allowlist and request/review features for OAuth apps in their Google Workspace.

On top of that, they almost certainly didn’t enable the scope limits for unchecked OAuth apps (e.g limiting it to sign-on/basic profile scopes).

And that they engaged Crowdstrike for incident response... who missed OAuth tokens in the clear?

Huh, curiously; I'm on Arch Linux, crash happens in Google Chrome (147.0.7727.101) for me too, but not in Firefox (149.0.2) nor even in Chromium (147.0.7727.101).

I find it fun we're all reading a story how Vercel likely is compromised somehow, and managed to reproduce a crash on their webpage, so now we all give it a try. Surely could never backfire :)

Sadly I coudn't make Chrome crash here. Would be fun.

Chrome Version 147.0.7727.101 (Official Build) (64-bit). Windows 11 Pro.

Video: https://imgur.com/a/pq6P4si

I use uBlock Origin Lite. Maybe it blocks some crash causing script? edit: still no crash when I disabled UBO.

Same thing here, 147.0.7727.101, M3 Macbook Air. Immediate crash of all open profile windows, so not even a tab-level crash.

Reminds me of circa 2021 Chromium bug where opening the dropdown menu on GitHub would crash the entire system on Linux. At some point, it got fixed.

Same with Chrome on Windows 11. I opened the vercel home page using the url once after which it stopped crashing when clicking on the logo.

I'm running 147.0.7727.57 and this doesn't happen. Macbook Air M5. VERY interesting.

Same hard crash on Chrome Windows 11

MBP - M4 Max - Chrome 146.0.7680.178.

No crash.

Now I don't want to click that "Finish update" button.

Do you have a chrome://crashes/ entry ?

How does that work, when you add an OAuth app, the resulting tokens are specific to that app having a certain set of permissions?

It's not a new attack vector as in giving too many scopes (beyond the usual "get personal details").

I am curious how this external OAuth app managed to move through the systems laterally.

I'm not super savvy with OAuth, but shouldn't scopes prevent issues like this?

https://oauth.net/2/scope/

LLM comment

Someone from marketing getting full access is absolutely a Vercel failure.

good point, we think of these OAuth logins as so safe and yet they may be the exact opposite because it's more like logging in with your master password. I think these oauth providers like Microsoft and Google need to start mandating 2FA for every company login, it's just too dangerous otherwise.

I remember implementing OAuth2 for my platform months ago and I was using the username from the provider's platform as the username within my own platform... But this is a big problem because what if a different person creates an account with the same username on a different platform? They could authenticate themselves onto my platform using that other provider to hijack the first person's account!

Thankfully I patched this issue just before it became a viable exploit because the two platforms I was supporting at the time had different username conventions; Google used email addresses with an @ symbol and GitHub used plain usernames; this naturally prevented the possibility of username hijacking. I discovered this issue as I was upgrading my platform to support universal OAuth; it would have been a major flaw had I not identified this. This sounds similar to the Vercel issue.

Anyway my fix was to append a unique hash based on the username and platform combination to the end of the username on my platform.

Who is this “theo” person and why are multiple people quoting him? He seems to have little to say that’s substantive at this point.

> Ones NOT marked as sensitive should be rolled out of precaution

if it's not marked as sensitive (because it is not sensitive) there is no reason to roll them. if you must roll a insensitive env var it should've been sensitive in the first place, no?

Conjecture, but the wording "limited subset" rarely turns out to be good news. Usually a provider will say "less than 1% of our users" or some specific number when they can to ease concerns. My guess is they don't have the visibility or they don't like the number.

I feel for the team; security incidents suck. I know they are working hard, I hope they start to communicate more openly and transparently.

I remember working support and being told "always say 'subset' unless you absolutely know it's exactly 100% of customers" lol

The lack of details itself is telling enough. Whatever comes out will be no doubt PR sanitised and some bigger clumps of truth won't make it through the PR process.

Not when limited to human communication

They put a massive amount of VC cash into convincing people that Next.js was "the modern way" to create a website. Then they got lucky with the timing of LLMs becoming popular while they were the hot thing, leading LLMs to default to it when creating new websites. To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.

Both have been changing as people realize it's rarely the right tool for the job, and as LLMs also become more intelligent and better at suggesting other, better options depending on what is asked for (especially Claude Opus).

You use a free template that's done in Next.js and uses its Image component, so you need a server.

Everything runs fine locally until you try to deploy it, and bam you need 4g ram machine to run the thing.

So you host it on Vercel for free cause it's easy!

Then you want to check for more than 30 seconds of analytics, and it's pay time.

Very nice developer experience. A lot of batteries included, like CDN, incremental page regeneration, image pipeline or observability. Not having to maintain a server.

I’m still planning to move elsewhere though, the vendor lock-in is not worth it and I’d like to keep our infra in the EU.

I haven't used Cloudflare and am the first to shit on Vercel. But I have to say, some aspects of their hosting are nice. In many ways it really is just a terminal command and up it goes with good tooling around it. For example, the PR previews take zero setup and just work. Managing your projects is easy, it's all nicely designed, it integrates well with Next and some other frontend-heavy systems and so on.

For many people Vercel is Easy (not simple)

Knowing how to operate a basic server is perceived as hard and dangerous by many, especially the generation that didn’t have a chance to play with Linux for fun when growing up

it's free for newbies and everyone, ofc it's a trap but freemium model gets people. aws can cost easily few thousands with 2-3 mistakes and clicks. vercel makes you start free then if you grow they bill you 10x-100x aws

For a lot of folks, I think its ease of deployment when using Next.js. I switched to astro, also doing a lot of cloudflare at the moment. Before that, I was doing OpenNext with sst.dev on AWS but it started feeling annoying.

If you are using nextjs it is easier because vercel done a lot of things to make it a pain to host outside of vercel.

There really isn't any if you are running a serious product.

They have a free tier plan for non-commercial usage and a very very good UX for just deploying your website.

Many companies start using Vercel for the convenience and, as they grow, they continue paying for it because migrating to a cheaper provider is inconvenient.

Out of curiosity what are you using cloudflare for that it costs $5 and who do you use for the baremetal box?

I suppose their market is one click deployments. Maybe for non technical people or people not willing to deal with infra.

Develop experience. Ephemeral deploys. Decent observability. Decent CI options. Generous free tier.

Can one host a Next js app on cloudflare?

I started using it a few years ago when I moved to my current company, and have to say I've learned to like it quite a bit. Moving to Cloudflare is an option, but currently it just works so we can't be bothered. Costs are not nothing, but basically no issues with it until now, and it's not so expensive that it raises eyebrows with the biggest being that we have 3 seats. The setup is quick and again it just works. We are a very small team, and the fact we don't have to deal with it on a daily/weekly basis is valuable. Obviously this current situation is a problem, but I am not sure which platform is free of issues like these. People act like it can't happen to me, until it does.

It takes a while to realize you're being gaslit.

0.82% of homes are burglarized every year.

Meaning since 2015, you’ve got an 8.2% chance of having someone walk out with that box. Hopefully there’s nothing precious on it.

It's very typical to have a retainer / insurance to bring in "emergency" incident responders beyond your existing team. Not saying that's the case here but it wouldn't be surprising.

He doesn't work at Vercel but he is the type to never pass up any opportunity to chase clout.

I don't know if I'd trust some random programmer-streamer-influencer on anything other than the topic of streamer-influencing.

Based on what, "feels like it"? Claiming that Cloudflare is affected by the same hack has to come from somewhere, but where is that coming from?

Ah, Theo with his vast insights and connections into everything. That man gets around, and his content is worth it's cost.

Theo's content boils down to the same boring formula. 1. Whatever buzzword headline is trending at the time 2. Immediate sponsored ad that is supposed to make you sympathize with Theo cause he "vets" his sponsors. 3. The man makes you listen to a "that totally happened" story that he somehow always involved himself personally. 4. Man serves you up an ad for his t3.chat and how it's the greatest thing in the world and how he should be paid more for his infinite wisdom. 5. A rag on Claude or OpenAI (whichever is leading at the time) 6. 5-10 minutes of paraphrasing an article without critical thought or analysis on the video topic.

I used to enjoy his content when he was still in his Ping era, but it's clear hes drunken the YT marketer kool-aid. I've moved on, his content gets recommend now and again, but I can't entertain his non-sense anymore.

”Any host” of what? That’s such a non-descriptive statement and clearly not true at face value.

I do remember that OpenAI did use Vercel a year ago. They might have likely moved off of it to something better.

> @theo: "I have reason to believe this is credible. If you are using Vercel, it’s a good idea to roll your secrets and env vars."

> @ErdalToprak: "And use your own vps or k3s cluster there’s no reason in 2026 to delegate your infra to a middle man except if you’re at AWS level needs"

> @theo: "This is still a stupid take"

lol, okay. Thanks for the insight, Theo, whoever you are.

> Next.js is the new PHP, but worse, since unlike PHP you don't really know what's server side and what's client side anymore. It's all just commingled and handled magically.

Wasn't unheard of back in the day, that you leaked things via PHP templates, like serializing and adding the whole user object including private details in a Twig template or whatever, it just happened the other way around kind of. This was before "fat frontend, thin backend" was the prevalent architecture, many built their "frontends" from templates with just sprinkles of JavaScript back then.

People say "Next.js is the new PHP" because it's the most popular and prominent tooling out there, and so by sheer number of available targets it's the one that comes up the most when things go wrong like this.

But there are more people trying to secure this framework and the underlying tools than there would be on some obscure framework or something the average company built themselves.

Also "pay a real provider", what does that mean? Are you again implying that the average company should be responsible for _more_ of their own security in their hosting stack, not less?

Most companies have _zero_ security engineers.. Using a vertically-integrated hosting company like Vercel (or other similar companies, perhaps with different tech stacks - this opinion has nothing to do with Next or Node) is very likely their best and most secure option based on what they are able to invest in that area.

Next.js is the polar opposite of PHP, in a way.

PHP was so simple and easy to understand that anyone with a text editor and some cheap shared hosting could pick it up, but also low level enough that almost nothing was magically done for you. The result was many inexperienced developers making really basic mistakes while implementing essential features that we now take for granted.

Frameworks like Next.js take the complete opposite approach, they are insanely complex but hide that complexity behind layers and layers of magic, actively discouraging developers from looking behind the curtain, and the result is that even experienced developers end up shooting themselves in the foot by using the magical incantations wrong.

The new PHP? PHP is the same PHP and it's still running 80% of the web to the point that even Reuters, NASA, White House are on it.

Is AWS security boundary the AWS account? Are you expecting Vercel to provision and manage an AWS account per user? That doesn’t make any sense man, though makes sense if you’re a former AWS employee.

I recently got hit by a car on my bike. While I was starting the claim filing process the web portal for ICBC (British Columbia insurance) was acting a little funky / stalling / and then gave me a weird access error. Down at the bottom of the error page was a little grey underlined link that said “vercel”.

I’m not exactly surprised, but it seems like the unserious, ill-informed and lazy are taking over. There is absolutely zero reason why a large, essential public service should be overspending and running on an unnecessary managed service like vercel… yet, here we are.

While I would agree, unfortunately with JavaScript vibecoding is not even necessary to run into issues.

I knew from that moment never to use any Vercel product. If your leadership is that compromised, you know the rest of the ship is heading into a wall.

he's completely ripped that post from the person who originally found it on breach forums. absolutely shameless.

https://x.com/DiffeKey/status/2045813085408051670

Crap...

You forgot the source to backup your claim

Your entire recent posting history is "software engineering is over, AI has won."

What's your agenda here?

LOL. Attackers will run these agents but the thousands of maintainers will be so dumb to sit idly and get hammered with exploits. I wonder what the ratio of attackers to maintainers must be, 1:1000 is a fair assessment i take it.

Also LLMs will be used to attack only, no one will be smart to integrate it into CI flows, because everyone is that dumb. No security tools will pop up.

Slop coding and makeshift sites being thrown up with abandon at breakneck speeds is going to buy me a lot of minivans.

>> ai is going to lead to mass security breaches.

Let that be the end of Microsoft. Was forced to use their shitty products for years, by corporate inertia and their free Teams and Azure licenses, first-dose-is-free, curse.

ShinyHunters are a phishing group. What does this have to do with AI agents?