They just added more details:

> Indicators of compromise (IOCs)

> Our investigation has revealed that the incident originated from a third-party AI tool whose Google Workspace OAuth app was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting hundreds of its users across many organizations.

> We are publishing the following IOC to support the wider community in the investigation and vetting of potential malicious activity in their environments. We recommend that Google Workspace Administrators and Google Account owners check for usage of this app immediately.

> OAuth App: 110671459871-30f1spbu0hptbs60cb4vsmv79i7bbvqj.apps.googleusercontent.com

https://vercel.com/kb/bulletin/vercel-april-2026-security-in...

• ryanscio

  yesterday at 11:11 PM

  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.

  • cowsup

    yesterday at 11:52 PM

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

    On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams.

    But on the other hand... It's Sunday. Unless you're tuned-in to social media over the weekend, your main provider could be undergoing a meltdown while you are completely unaware. Many higher-up folks check company email over the weekend, but if they're traveling or relaxing, social media might be the furthest thing from their mind. It really bites that this is the only way to get critical information.

    • gk1

      today at 1:22 AM

      > On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams

      This is not how things work. In a crisis like this there is a war room with all stakeholders present. Doesn’t matter if it’s Sunday or 3am or Christmas.

      And for this company specifically, Guillermo is not one to defer to comms or legal.

    • loloquwowndueo

      today at 12:10 AM

      > the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams.

      They can be brought in to do their job on a Sunday for an event of this relevance. They can always take next Friday off or something.

    • eclipticplane

      today at 12:22 AM

      Has anyone actually gotten an email from Vercel confirming their secrets were accessed? Right now we're all operating under the hope (?) that since we haven't (yet?) gotten an email, we're not completely hosed.

      • loloquwowndueo

        today at 12:24 AM

        Hope-based security should not be a thing. Did you rotate your secrets? Did you audit your platform for weird access patterns? Don’t sit waiting for that vercel email.

        • eclipticplane

          today at 12:33 AM

          Of course rotated. But we don't even know when the secrets were stolen vs we were told, so we're missing a ton of info needed to _fully_ triage.

      • ItsClo688

        today at 1:00 AM

        nope...I feel u, the "Hope-based security" is exactly what Vercel is forcing on its users right now by prioritizing social media over direct notification.

        If the attacker is moving with "surprising velocity," every hour of delay on an email blast is another hour the attacker has to use those potentially stolen secrets against downstream infrastructure. Using Twitter/X as a primary disclosure channel for a "sophisticated" breach is amateur hour. If legal is the bottleneck for a mass email during an active compromise, then your incident response plan is fundamentally broken.

    • refulgentis

      today at 1:25 AM

      I'm going down with the ship over on X.com the Everything App. There's a parcel of very important tech people that are running some playbook where posting to X.com is sufficient enough to be unimpeachable on communication, despite its rather beleaguered state and traffic.

• loloquwowndueo

  yesterday at 7:34 PM

  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.

  • pottertheotter

    yesterday at 11:34 PM

    It’s context.ai

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

  • progbits

    yesterday at 7:52 PM

    I was trying to look it up (basically https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2/java... -- the consent screen shows the app name) but it now says "Error 401: invalid_client; The OAuth client was not found." so it was probably deleted by the oauth client owner.

    • tom1337

      yesterday at 7:54 PM

      It indeed was deleted as this URL shows: https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/v2/auth?client_id=11067...

      • yesterday at 8:04 PM

    • loloquwowndueo

      yesterday at 8:36 PM

      Makes it even more relevant to have the actual app or vendor name - who’s to say they just removed it to save face and won’t add it later?

• cebert

  yesterday at 8:03 PM

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

  • pottertheotter

    yesterday at 11:34 PM

    It’s context.ai

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

    • yesterday at 11:57 PM

    • sroussey

      today at 12:55 AM

      Which itself was the subject of a broader compromise as far as i can tell

  • SaltyBackendGuy

    yesterday at 9:03 PM

    Maybe legal red tape?

    • brookst

      today at 12:04 AM

      Yes. The oauth ID is indisputable. It it seems to be context.ai. But suppose it was a fake context.ai that the employee was tricked into using. Or… or…

      Better to report 100% known things quickly. People can figure it out with near zero effort, and it reduces one tiny bit of potential liability in the ops shitstorm they’re going through.

  • mcdow

    yesterday at 9:04 PM

    They might be buying time to sell the relevant stock

• newdee

  yesterday at 7:52 PM

  It looks like the app has already been deleted

• hansmayer

  yesterday at 8:12 PM

  [flagged]

  • junon

    yesterday at 9:06 PM

    This was a Google oauth app and it was phished. So... No.

• slopinthebag

  yesterday at 8:02 PM

  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?

  • lijok

    yesterday at 8:05 PM

    This isn't a web development concept. It's the unix philosophy of "write programs that do one thing and do it well" and interconnect them, being taken to the extremes that were never intended.

    We need a different hosting model.

    • esseph

      yesterday at 10:48 PM

      > We need a different hosting model.

      There really isn't an option here, IMO.

      1. Somebody does it

      2. You do it

      Much happier doing it myself tbh.

    • slopinthebag

      yesterday at 8:06 PM

      In my mind the unix philosophy leads to running your cloud on your own hardware or VPS's, not this.

      • bdangubic

        yesterday at 8:12 PM

        exactly this, write - not use some sh*t written by some dude from Akron OH 2 years ago”

        • arcfour

          yesterday at 8:21 PM

          That's why I wrote my own compiler and coreutils. Can't trust some shit written by GNU developers 30 years ago.

          And my own kernel. Can't trust some shit written by a Finnish dude 30 years ago.

          And my own UEFI firmware. Definitely can't trust some shit written by my hardware vendor ever.

          • slopinthebag

            yesterday at 8:49 PM

            Yeah definitely no difference between GNU coreutils and some vibe coded AI tool released last month that wants full oAuth permissions.

            • eddythompson80

              yesterday at 9:04 PM

              I’m not joking, but weirdly enough, that’s what most AI arguments boil down to. Show me what the difference is while I pull up the endless CVE list of which ever coreutils package you had in mind. It’s a frustrating argument because you know that authors of coreutils-like packages had intentionality in their work, while an LLM has no such thing. Yet at the end, security vulnerabilities are abundant in both.

              The AI maximalists would argue that the only way is through more AI. Vibe code the app, then ask an LLM to security review it, then vibe code the security fixes, then ask the LLM to review the fixes and app again, rinse and repeat in an endless loop. Same with regressions, performance, features, etc. stick the LLM in endless loops for every vertical you care about.

              Pointing to failed experiments like the browser or compiler ones somehow don’t seem to deter AI maximalists. They would simply claim they needed better models/skills/harness/tools/etc. the goalpost is always one foot away.

              • arcfour

                yesterday at 10:16 PM

                I wouldn't describe myself as an AI maximalist at all. I just don't believe the false dichotomy of you either produce "vulnerable vibe coded AI slop running on a managed service" or "pure handcrafted code running on a self hosted service."

                You can write good and bad code with and without AI, on a managed service, self-hosted, or something in between.

                And the comment I was replying to said something about not trusting something written in Akron, OH 2 years ago, which makes no sense and is barely an argument, and I was mostly pointing out how silly that comment sounds.

              • slopinthebag

                yesterday at 11:09 PM

                It's such a bad faith argument, they basically make false equivalencies with LLMs and other software. Same with the "AI is just a higher level compiler" argument. The "just" is doing a ton of heavy lifting in those arguments.

                Regarding the unix philosophy argument, comparing it to AI tools just doesn't make any sense. If you look at what the philosophy is, it's obvious that it doesn't just boil down to "use many small tools" or "use many dependencies", it's so different that it not even wrong [0].

                In their Unix paper of 1974, Ritchie and Thompson quote the following design considerations:

                - Make it easy to write, test, and run programs.

                - Interactive use instead of batch processing.

                - Economy and elegance of design due to size constraints ("salvation through suffering").

                - Self-supporting system: all Unix software is maintained under Unix.

                In what way does that correspond to "use dependencies" or "use AI tools"? This was then formalised later to

                - Write programs that do one thing and do it well.

                - Write programs to work together.

                - Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

                This has absolutely nothing in common with pulling in thousands of dependences or using hundreds of third party services.

                Then there is the argument that "AI is just a higher level compiler". That is akin to me saying that "AI is just a higher level musical instrument" except it's not, because it functions completely differently to musical instruments and people operate them in a completely different way. The argument seems to be that since both of them produce music, in the same way both a compiler and LLM generate "code", they are equivalent. The overarching argument is that only outputs matter, except when they don't because the LLM produces flawed outputs, so really it's just that the outputs are equivalent in the abstract, if you ignore the concrete real-world reality. Using that same argument, Spotify is a musical instrument because it outputs music, and hey look, my guitar also outputs music!

                0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

            • brookst

              today at 12:05 AM

              So it’s not a binary thing, there’s context and nuance?

            • arcfour

              yesterday at 8:57 PM

              Embrace the suck.

          • DASD

            yesterday at 8:27 PM

            TempleOS, is that you?

Claude Code defaulting to a certain set of recommended providers[0] and frameworks is making the web more homogenous and that lack of diversity is increasing the blast radius of incidents

[0] https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-picks/report

• operatingthetan

  yesterday at 6:03 PM

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

  • Aurornis

    yesterday at 7:26 PM

    Reddit vibecoded LLM posts are kind of fascinating for how homogenous they are. The number of vibe coded half-finished projects posted to common subreddits daily is crazy high.

    It’s interesting how they all use LLMs to write their Reddit posts, too. Some of them could have drawn in some people if they took 5 minutes to type an announcement post in their own words, but they all have the same LLM style announcement post, too. I wonder if they’re conversing with the LLM and it told them to post it to Reddit for traction?

    • derefr

      today at 12:17 AM

      I find that often the developers of these apps don't speak English, but want to target an English-speaking audience. For the marketing copy, they're using the LLM more to translate than to paraphrase, but the LLM ends up paraphrasing anyway.

    • politelemon

      yesterday at 7:51 PM

      They are not exclusive to reddit. HN has also been full of vibe submissions of the same nature.

  • gbgarbeb

    yesterday at 6:39 PM

    10 years ago it was Heroku and Three.js.

    • boringg

      yesterday at 6:58 PM

      New one coming in 5 years. Cycle repeats itself.

      • guelo

        today at 1:02 AM

        I don't think so, AIs are going to freeze the tooling to what we have today since that's what's in the training corpus, and it's self reinforcing.

    • seattle_spring

      yesterday at 7:34 PM

      10 years ago it was Heroku and Ruby on Rails*

      • bdcravens

        yesterday at 11:38 PM

        More like 15. By 2016, Rails was supposedly dead and we were all going to be running the same code on the front end and back end in a full stack, MongoDB euphoria.

      • dzonga

        yesterday at 11:16 PM

        but now Ruby on Rails is not a circus like how Next.js is.

        see [0]: Rails security Audit Report

        [0]: https://ostif.org/ruby-on-rails-audit-complete/

  • fantasizr

    yesterday at 6:14 PM

    next, vercel, and supabase is basically the foundation of every vibecoded project by mere suggestion.

    • yesterday at 6:28 PM

    • MrDarcy

      yesterday at 8:41 PM

      They’re all shit too. All three decided to do custom auth instead of OIDC and it’s a nightmare to integrate with any of them.

  • echelon

    yesterday at 7:24 PM

    Another Anthropic revenue stream:

    Protection money from Vercel.

    "Pay us 10% of revenue or we switch to generating Netlify code."

    • JLO64

      yesterday at 7:51 PM

      Wouldn’t Vercel still make money in that scenario since Netlify uses them?

      • slopinthebag

        yesterday at 7:57 PM

        Netlify uses AWS (and Cloudflare? Vercel def uses Cloudflare)

        • serhalp

          yesterday at 11:09 PM

          Netlify and Vercel both use AWS. AFAIK neither uses Cloudflare. Vercel did use Cloudflare for parts of its infra until about a year ago though.

          • slopinthebag

            today at 1:14 AM

            Ah, ok. I knew they did use Cloudflare but had no idea they migrated off of it.

        • arcfour

          yesterday at 8:23 PM

          Vercel runs on AWS.

• neilv

  yesterday at 7:07 PM

  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

  • t0mas88

    yesterday at 8:05 PM

    You can tell Claude to use something highly structured like Spring Boot / Java. It's a bit more verbose in code, but the documentation is very good which makes Claude use it well. And the strict nature of Java is nice in keeping Claude on track and finding bugs early.

    I've heard others had similar results with .NET/C#

    • lmm

      today at 12:30 AM

      Spring Boot is every bit as random mystery meat as Vercel or Rails. If you want explicit then use non-Boot Spring or even no Spring at all.

    • MrDarcy

      yesterday at 8:39 PM

      Same for Go.

  • BigTTYGothGF

    yesterday at 7:39 PM

    > forcing myself to use Claude Code

    You don't have to live like this.

    • neilv

      yesterday at 8:10 PM

      Even though I'm a hardcore programmer and software engineer, I still need to at least keep aware of the latest vibe coding stuff, so I know what's good and bad about it.

  • siva7

    yesterday at 7:48 PM

    I'm struggling to understand how they bought Bun but their own Ai Models are more fixated in writing python for everything than even the models of their competitor who bought the actual Python ecosystem (OAI with uv)

  • Imustaskforhelp

    yesterday at 8:21 PM

    > Python

    I once made a golang multi-person pomodoro app by vibe coding with gemini 3.1 pro (when it had first launched first day) and I asked it to basically only have one outside dependency of gorrilla websockets and everything else from standard library and then I deployed it to hugging face spaces for free.

    I definitely recommend golang as a language if you wish to vibe code. Some people recommend rust but Golang compiles fast, its cross compilation and portable and is really awesome with its standard library

    (Anecdotally I also feel like there is some chances that the models are being diluted cuz like this thing then has become my benchmark test and others have performed somewhat worse or not the same as this to be honest and its only been a few days since I am now using hackernews less frequently and I am/was already seeing suspicions like these about claude and other models on the front page iirc. I don't know enough about claude opus 4.7 but I just read simon's comment on it, so it would be cool if someone can give me a gist of what is happening for the past few days.)

  • echelon

    yesterday at 7:20 PM

    It emits Actix and Axum extremely well with solid support for fully AOT type checked Sqlx.

    Switch to vibe coding Rust backends and freeze your supply chain.

    Super strong types. Immaculate error handling. Clear and easy to read code. Rock solid performance. Minimal dependencies.

    Vibe code Rust for web work. You don't even need to know Rust. You'll osmose it over a few months using it. It's not hard at all. The "Rust is hard" memes are bullshit, and the "difficult to refactor" was (1) never true and (2) not even applicable with tools like Claude Code.

    Edit: people hate this (-3), but it's where the alpha is. Don't blindly dismiss this. Serializing business logic to Rust is a smart move. The language is very clean, easy to read, handles errors in a first class fashion, and fast. If the code compiles, then 50% of your error classes are already dealt with.

    Python, Typescript, and Go are less satisfactory on one or more of these dimensions. If you generate code, generate Rust.

    • neilv

      yesterday at 7:24 PM

      How are you getting low dependencies for Web backend with Rust? (All my manually-written Rust programs that use crates at all end up pulling in a large pile of transitive dependencies.)

    • slopinthebag

      yesterday at 7:55 PM

      Ok I mean this is a little crazy, "minimal dependencies" and Rust? Brother I need dependencies to write async traits without tearing my hair out.

      But you're also correct in that Rust is actually possible to write in a more high level way, especially for web where you have very little shared state and the state that is shared can just be wrapped in Arc<> and put in the web frameworks context. It's actually dead easy to spin up web services in Rust, and they have a great set of ORM's if thats your vibe too. Rust is expressive enough to make schema-as-code work well.

      On the dependencies, if you're concerned about the possibility of future supply chain attacks (because Rust doesn't have a history like Node) you can vendor your deps and bypass future problems. `cargo vendor` and you're done, Node has no such ergonomic path to vendoring, which imo is a better solution than anything else besides maybe Go (another great option for web services!). Saying "don't use deps" doesn't work for any other language other than something like Go (and you can run `go vendor` as well).

      But yeah, in today's economy where compute and especially memory is becoming more constrained thanks to AI, I really like the peace of mind knowing my unoptimised high level Rust web services run with minimal memory and compute requirements, and further optimisation doesn't require a rewrite to a different language.

      Idk mate, I used to be a big Rust hater but once I gave the language a serious try I find it more pleasant to write compared to both Typescript and Go. And it's very amiable to AI if that's your vibe(coding), since the static guarantees of the type system make it easier for AI to generate correct code, and the diagnostics messages allow it to reroute it's course during the session.

    • OptionOfT

      yesterday at 7:25 PM

      Except with using Rust like this you're using it like C#. You don't get to enjoy the type system to express your invariants.

• lmm

  today at 12:41 AM

  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.

• nightski

  yesterday at 5:53 PM

  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.

  • pastel8739

    today at 12:38 AM

    Shouldn’t Claude just refuse to make decisions, then, if it is problematic for it to do so? We’re talking about a trillion dollar company here, not a new grad with stars in their eyes

  • dennisy

    yesterday at 5:55 PM

    I think most people would agree.

    However it is less clear on how to do this, people mostly take the easiest path.

    • fintler

      yesterday at 6:14 PM

      Its an eternal september moment.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

      • userbinator

        yesterday at 8:31 PM

        Eternal Sloptember

        • today at 12:38 AM

    • operatingthetan

      yesterday at 6:37 PM

      I guess engineers can differentiate their vibecoded projects by selecting an eccentric stack.

      • alex7o

        yesterday at 6:59 PM

        Choosing an eccentric stack makes the llms do better even. Like Effect.ts or Elixir

        • rpcope1

          yesterday at 7:39 PM

          I actually noticed the same. Having it work on Mithril.js instead of React seems (I know it's all just kind of hearsay) to generate a lot cleaner code. Maybe it's just because I know and like Mithril better, but also is likely because of the project ethos and it's being used by people who really want to use Mithril in the wild. I've seen the same for other slightly more exotic stacks like bottle vs flask, and telling it to generate Scala or Erlang.

    • egeozcan

      yesterday at 6:45 PM

      > a. Actually do something sane but it will eat your session

      > b. (Recommended) Do something that works now, you can always make it better later

  • duped

    yesterday at 7:17 PM

    No, the problem is the people building and selling these tools. They are marketed as a way of outsourcing thinking.

    • dennisy

      yesterday at 7:24 PM

      So what are you suggesting do not allow companies to sell such tools?

      • duped

        yesterday at 7:37 PM

        I'm suggesting people shouldn't lie to sell things because their customers will believe them and this causes measurable harm to society.

        • liveoneggs

          yesterday at 7:57 PM

          AI does outsource thinking. It is not a lie.

          • hansmayer

            yesterday at 8:54 PM

            If you don't tend to think much in the first place or have low expectations, then yes

          • duped

            yesterday at 8:36 PM

            I think if you believe that you're either lying or experiencing psychosis. LLMs are the greatest innovation in information retrieval since PageRank but they are not capable of thought anymore than PageRank is.

• neal_jones

  yesterday at 6:29 PM

  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

  • themafia

    yesterday at 6:42 PM

    > convergence to the mean

    That's a funny way of saying "race to the bottom."

    > The internet does that but it feels different with this

    How does "the internet do that?" What force on the internet naturally brings about mediocrity? Or have we confused rapacious and monopolistic corporations with the internet at large?

    • walthamstow

      yesterday at 8:56 PM

      I'd call it race to the median, converging to mediocrity, or what the kids would call "mid"

    • slashdave

      today at 12:06 AM

      > How does "the internet do that?"

      Stack exchange. Google.

    • mentalgear

      yesterday at 7:25 PM

      Indeed 'race to the bottom' seems more like capitalism in general.

• slashdave

  today at 12:03 AM

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

• elric

  yesterday at 7:24 PM

  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

  • habinero

    yesterday at 8:27 PM

    I love Hank, but he has such a weird EA-shaped blind spot when it comes to AI. idgi

    It is true that "more diversity in code" probably means less turnkey spray-and-pray compromises, sure. Probably.

    It also means that the models themselves become targets. If your models start building the same generated code with the same vulnerability, how're you gonna patch that?

    • kay_o

      yesterday at 10:07 PM

      > start building the same generated code with the same vulnerability

      This situation is pretty funny to me. Some of my friends who arent technical tried vibe coding and showed me what they built and asked for feedback

      I noticed they were using Supabase by default, pointed out that their database was completely open with no RLS

      So I told them not to use Supabase in that way, and they asked the AI (various diff LLMs) to fix it. One example prompt I saw was: please remove Supabase because of the insecure data access and make a proper secure way.

      Keep in mind, these ppl dont have a technical background and do not know what supabase or node or python is. They let the llm install docker, install node, etc and just hit approve on "Do you want to continue? bash(brew install ..)"

      Whats interesting is that this happened multiple times with different AI models. Instead of fixing the problem the way a developer normally would like moving the database logic to the server or creating proper API endpoints it tried to recreate an emulation of Supabase, specifically PostgREST in a much worse and less secure way.

      The result was an API endpoint that looked like: /api/query?q=SELECT * FROM table WHERE x

      In one example GLM later bolted on a huge "security" regular expression that blocked , admin, updateadmin, ^delete* lol

• betocmn

  yesterday at 7:51 PM

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

• mvkel

  yesterday at 7:29 PM

  That's only looking at half of the equation.

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

• btown

  yesterday at 6:17 PM

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

• stefan_

  yesterday at 6:25 PM

  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).

• andersmurphy

  yesterday at 6:07 PM

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

  • egeozcan

    yesterday at 6:47 PM

    Self fulfilling prophecy: You don't need to secure anything because it doesn't make a difference, as Mythos is not just a delicious Greek beer, but also a super-intelligent system that will penetrate any of your cyber-defenses anyway.

    • andersmurphy

      yesterday at 6:58 PM

      In some ways Mythos (like many AI things) can be used as the ultimate accountability sink.

      These libraries/frameworks are not insecure because of bad design and dependency bloat. No! It's because a mythical LLM is so powerful that it's impossible to defend against! There was nothing that could be done.

    • Something1234

      yesterday at 7:36 PM

      Explain more about this beer.

  • wonnage

    yesterday at 6:38 PM

    Conspiracy theory: they intentionally seeded the world with millions of slop PRs and now they’re “catching bugs” with Mythos

I've been part of a response team on a security incident and I really feel for them. However, this initial communication is terrible.

Something happened, we won't say what, but it was severe enough to notify law enforcement. What floors me is the only actionable advice is to "review environment variables". What should a customer even do with that advice? Make sure the variable are still there? How would you know if any of them were exposed or leaked?

The advice should be to IMMEDIATELY rotate all passwords, access tokens, and any sensitive information shared with Vercel. And then begin to audit access logs, customer data, etc, for unusual activity.

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

I know there is a huge fog of uncertainly in the early stages of an incident, but it spooks me how intentionally vague they seem to be here about what happened and who has been impacted.

• btown

  yesterday at 8:21 PM

  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

  • aziaziazi

    yesterday at 9:33 PM

    The “sensitive” toggle is off by default. I’m curious about the rationale, what's the benefit of this default for users and/or Vercel?

    https://vercel.com/docs/environment-variables/sensitive-envi...

    • loloquwowndueo

      yesterday at 10:07 PM

      Sensitive environment variables are environment variables whose values are non-readable once created.

      So they are harder to introspect and review once set.

      It’s probably good practice to put non-secret-material in non-sensitive variables.

      (Pure speculation, I’ve never used Vercel)

      • _heimdall

        yesterday at 10:20 PM

        I have used Vercel though prefer other hosts.

        There are cases where I want env variables to be considered non-secure and fine to be read later, I have one in a current project that defines the email address used as the From address for automated emails for example.

        In my opinion the lack of security should be opt-in rather than opt-out though. Meaning it should be considered secure by default with an option to make it readable.

    • throw03172019

      yesterday at 10:41 PM

      Simpler for vibe coders.

  • jtchang

    yesterday at 10:44 PM

    How does the app read the variable if it can't be read after you input it? Or do they mean you can't view it after providing the variable value to the UI?

    • ctmnt

      today at 1:08 AM

      They mean the latter. Very unclear how that translates to meaningful security.

• birdsongs

  yesterday at 4:53 PM

  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?

  • shimman

    yesterday at 5:22 PM

    Please remember that this is the same company that couldn't figure out how to authorize 3rd party middleware and had, with what should be a company ending, critical vulnerability .

    Oh and the owner likes to proudly remind people about his work on Google AMP, a product that has done major damage to the open web.

    This is who they are: a bunch of incompetent engineers that play with pension funds + gulf money.

    • yesterday at 11:17 PM

  • 1970-01-01

    yesterday at 8:58 PM

    I just deleted my account. Their laid-back notice just is not worth it anymore. I will hold them accountable using my cash. You can get out with me. Let their apologies hit your spam filter. They need to be better prepared to react to the storm of insanity that comes with a breach or they lose my info (lose it twice, I guess..)

  • salomonk_mur

    today at 1:04 AM

    Says they emailed affected customers...

• gherkinnn

  yesterday at 9:40 PM

  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

• tcp_handshaker

  yesterday at 10:05 PM

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

  • esseph

    yesterday at 10:44 PM

    Having worked both public and private, I can agree with this.

    Google in particular has been staggeringly good, and don't sleep on IBM when they Actually Care.

  • dd_xplore

    yesterday at 10:48 PM

    Oracle too

    • gustavus

      yesterday at 11:40 PM

      Oracle? Oracle?

      The Oracle that published an announcement that said "we didn't get hacked" when the hackers had private customer info?

      The Oracle that does not allow you to do any security testing on their software unless you use one of their approved vendors?

      The Oracle that one of my customers uses where they have to turn off the HR portal for 2 weeks before annual performance evaluations because there is no way to prevent people from seeing things?

      The only reason Oracle isn't having nightmarish security problems published every other week is because they threaten to sue anyone that does find an issue.

      Oracle is a joke in every conceivable way and I despise them on a personal level.

      • warmedcookie

        today at 1:00 AM

        I love a good cathartic rant

• 0xmattf

  yesterday at 4:57 PM

  > 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.

  • cleaning

    yesterday at 10:13 PM

    If you're only paying $3-5 on Linode then your level of usage would probably be comfortably at $0 on Vercel.

    • 0xmattf

      yesterday at 11:00 PM

      It could be $0 on Render too, but then there's going to be a 3 minute load time for a landing page to become visible, lol. So if you don't want your server to sleep, you're going to have to pay $20/month.

      Does Vercel do the same?

      • somewhatgoated

        today at 12:24 AM

        No, I run several small websites on Vercel for free for years, always served static pages very quickly

        • anurag

          today at 1:20 AM

          Render offers free static sites that are served via a CDN and load instantly: https://render.com/docs/static-sites

    • esseph

      yesterday at 10:45 PM

      Makes sense considering the quality of Vercel's security response and customer communication.

  • nightski

    yesterday at 6:03 PM

    Looking at linode, those prices get you an instance with 1Gb of ram and a mediocre CPU. So you are running all of your applications on that?

    • 0xmattf

      yesterday at 6:43 PM

      Personal projects/MVPs/small projects? Absolutely. For what I'm running, there's no reason to need anything beyond that.

      The point is, I used to just throw everything up on a PaaS. Heroku/Render, etc. and pay way more than I needed to, even if I had 0 users, lol.

    • adhamsalama

      yesterday at 8:59 PM

      For $3.5, Hetzner gives 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, and 10 TB of bandwidth.

      • eatery1234

        today at 1:28 AM

        Pretty oversold iirc, but then again, that's the same for Linode

      • skeeter2020

        yesterday at 9:19 PM

        how much work should the GP do to migrate if Linode is good enough, to potentially save up to $1.50/month (or spend 50 cents more)?

  • yesterday at 5:31 PM

  • p_stuart82

    yesterday at 10:00 PM

    exactly people paid the premium so somebody else's OAuth screwup wouldn't become their Sunday. and here we are.

• lo1tuma

  yesterday at 9:15 PM

  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

• rybosome

  yesterday at 6:03 PM

  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.

• elmo2you

  yesterday at 8:29 PM

  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

They just added more details:

> Indicators of compromise (IOCs)

> Our investigation has revealed that the incident originated from a third-party AI tool whose Google Workspace OAuth app was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting hundreds of its users across many organizations.

> We are publishing the following IOC to support the wider community in the investigation and vetting of potential malicious activity in their environments. We recommend that Google Workspace Administrators and Google Account owners check for usage of this app immediately.

> OAuth App: 110671459871-30f1spbu0hptbs60cb4vsmv79i7bbvqj.apps.googleusercontent.com

https://vercel.com/kb/bulletin/vercel-april-2026-security-in...

• dev360

  yesterday at 8:10 PM

  I wonder which tool that is

> Vercel did not specify which of its systems were compromised

I’m no security engineer, but this is flatly unacceptable, right? This feels like Vercel is covering its own ass in favor of helping its customers understand the impact of this incident.

• hyperadvanced

  yesterday at 11:57 PM

  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”)

I'm on a macbook pro, Google Chrome 147.0.7727.56.

Clicking the Vercel logo at the top left of the page hard crashes my Chrome app. Like, immediate crash.

What an interesting bug.

• embedding-shape

  yesterday at 4:09 PM

  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 :)

  • nozzlegear

    yesterday at 4:31 PM

    Works in Safari too. Sounds like a Google Chrome thing.

  • sbrother

    yesterday at 6:18 PM

    Following since I just reproduced the crash on my own system (Chrome on Ubuntu)

• yesterday at 4:36 PM

• bel8

  yesterday at 8:47 PM

  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.

• devld

  yesterday at 5:24 PM

  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.

• Malipeddi

  yesterday at 4:24 PM

  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.

• burnte

  yesterday at 3:49 PM

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

• plexicle

  yesterday at 4:47 PM

  MBP - M4 Max - Chrome 146.0.7680.178.

  No crash.

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

  • 152334H

    yesterday at 5:19 PM

    if it does so happen that the crash originates from a browser exploit, you should expect to be more at risk due to the absence of a crash on an older version, not less

• farnulfo

  yesterday at 3:09 PM

  Same hard crash on Chrome Windows 11

• itaintmagic

  yesterday at 3:16 PM

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

  • rapfaria

    yesterday at 3:59 PM

    it did add an entry - windows 11, chrome

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824426

https://x.com/theo/status/2045862972342313374

> I have reason to believe this is credible.

https://x.com/theo/status/2045870216555499636

> Env vars marked as sensitive are safe. Ones NOT marked as sensitive should be rolled out of precaution

https://x.com/theo/status/2045871215705747965

> Everything I know about this hack suggests it could happen to any host

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

> Vercel has reportedly been breached by ShinyHunters.

• tom1337

  yesterday at 7:31 PM

  > 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?

  • jackconsidine

    yesterday at 8:55 PM

    There's a difference between sensitive, private and public. If public (i.e. NEXT_PUBLIC_) then yeah likely not a reason to roll. Private keys that aren't explicitly sensitive probably are still sensitive. It doesn't seem to be the default to have things "sensitive" and I can't tell if that's a new classification or has always been there.

    I can imagine the reason why an env variable would be sensitive, but need to be re-read at some point. But overwhelmingly it makes sense for the default to be set, and never access again (i.e. Fly env values, GCP secret manager etc)

• otterley

  yesterday at 3:48 PM

  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.

  • gordonhart

    yesterday at 3:56 PM

    He’s a tech influencer, probably getting quoted here because he has the biggest reach of people covering this so far.

  • Aurornis

    yesterday at 7:37 PM

    He’s a streamer who talks about tech. Previously had a sponsorship relationship with Vercel so is theoretically more well connected than average on the topic. He’s also very divisive because he does a lot of ragebait, grievance reporting, and contrarian takes but famously has blind spots for a few companies and technologies that he’s favored in past videos or been sponsored by. I have friends who watch a lot of his videos but I’ve never been able to get into it.

  • MikeNotThePope

    yesterday at 3:55 PM

    Theo Browne is a reasonably well known YouTuber & YC founder.

    https://t3.gg/

  • yesterday at 4:16 PM

  • nothinkjustai

    yesterday at 5:05 PM

    He is a paid Vercel shill (literally, he does sponsored content for them on his YouTube channel)

    • djeastm

      yesterday at 9:55 PM

      Not in a few years.

    • TiredOfLife

      yesterday at 6:59 PM

      He literally doesn't. https://x.com/theo/status/1832228209573949947

  • reactordev

    yesterday at 4:35 PM

    YT tech vlogger

Incidents like this are a good reminder of how concentrated our single points of failure have become in the modern web ecosystem. I appreciate the transparency in their disclosure so far, but it definitely makes you re-evaluate the risk profile of leaning entirely on fully managed PaaS solutions.

Is this one of those situations where _a lot_ of customers are affected and the “subset” are just the bigger ones they can’t afford to lose?

• toddmorey

  yesterday at 4:50 PM

  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.

  • loloquwowndueo

    yesterday at 4:52 PM

    “Less than 1% of our users” means 10k affected users if you have 1 million users. 10k victims is a lot! Imagine “air travel is safe, only a subset of 1% of travellers die”

A "limited subset of customers" could be 99% of them and the phrase would still be technically true.

The lack of details makes me wonder how large this "subset" of users really is

• gib444

  yesterday at 8:02 PM

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

• bossyTeacher

  yesterday at 4:28 PM

  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.

Use VPS, nowadays with the help of AI it's a lot easier to set everything up, you don't need Versel at all. And of course way cheaper

Wow, maybe Cloudflare can help them secure their systems? I hear they have a pretty good WAF.

This announcement in its current form is quite useless and not actionable. As least people won’t be able to say “why didn’t you say something sooner?” They said _something_

What is the rationale for using vercel ? I'm getting a lot of value out of cloudflare with the $5/month plan lately but my bare metal box with triple digit ram has seen zero downtime since 2015.

• deaux

  yesterday at 5:27 PM

  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).

  • apsurd

    yesterday at 6:07 PM

    I really want this to be true. nextjs is a nightmare. I'm eternally disgruntled.

    nextjs is also powerful due to AI. But the value is a robust interactive front-end, easily iterated, with maybe SSR backing, nothing specific to nextjs (it's routing semantics + React).

    So much complexity has gone into SSR. I hate 5MB client runtime just to read text as much as anyone, but not if the tradeoff is isomorphic env with magic file first-line incantations.

    • consumer451

      yesterday at 9:25 PM

      I have found SvelteKit really nice for SSR, and it avoids dealing with Vercel entirely.

      Recent Claude models do well with it, especially after adding the official skill.

      I have only recently started using it, so would love to hear about anyone else's experience.

  • gitgud

    yesterday at 11:47 PM

    I don’t think they “got lucky”. nextjs is an old project now, and for a long time it was the simplest framework to run a React website.

    This is why most open source landing pages used nextjs, and if most FOSS landing pages use it, then most LLM’s have been trained on it, which means LLM’s are more familiar with that framework and choose it

    There must be a term for this kind of LLM driven adoption flywheel…

  • autoexec

    yesterday at 7:01 PM

    > To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.

    I guess they should have put some of that marketing money into hiring someone to manage the security of their systems. It's pretty telling that they had to hire an "incident response provider" just to figure out what happened and clean up after the hack. If you treat security like something you don't have to worry about until after you've been hacked you're probably going to get hacked.

    • habinero

      yesterday at 8:32 PM

      > they had to hire an "incident response provider" just to figure out what happened and clean up after the hack

      Plenty to criticize them for, but that's totally standard and not something to ding them for. Probably something their cyber insurance has in their contract.

      Forensics is its own set of skills, different from appsec and general blue team duties. You really want to make sure no backdoors got left in.

  • pier25

    yesterday at 10:18 PM

    > They put a massive amount of VC cash into convincing people that Next.js was "the modern way" to create a website

    My impression is Next started becoming popular mostly as a reaction against create-react-app.

  • mrits

    yesterday at 6:45 PM

    So glad I decided to just stick with django/htmx on my project a few years ago. I invested a little time into nextjs and came to the conclusion that this can't be the way.

  • huflungdung

    yesterday at 6:54 PM

    [dead]

• senko

  yesterday at 5:18 PM

  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.

  • systemvoltage

    yesterday at 6:24 PM

    I am not following the logic. If you’re a hobbyist, sure.

    But the argument is if you’re using Vercel for production, you’re paying 5-10x what you’d pay for a VM, with 4gb.

    So then what’s the rationale? You can’t be a hobbyist but also “it’s pay time” for production?

    • rwyinuse

      yesterday at 6:33 PM

      Perhaps the rationale is laziness. Maintaining VM probably takes some more effort and competence than deploying to Vercel. Some people are willing to pay to minimize effort and the need to learn anything.

      • ajdegol

        yesterday at 7:02 PM

        Vercel auto creates deployments on pushes to branches. That was a super useful feature in beta testing web stuff.

    • prinny_

      yesterday at 8:44 PM

      Vercel promises to engineer the pain away when it comes to deployment. The thing however is that Vercel introduced that pain in the first place by writing sub-par documentation and splitting many of NextJS functions into small parts with different cost.

• zoul

  yesterday at 5:24 PM

  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.

  • tucnak

    yesterday at 6:18 PM

    All of this is available in Cloudflare $5 plan?

    • dandaka

      yesterday at 7:59 PM

      Every three months I'm trying to deploy to Cloudflare from Monorepo and I hadn't have success yet. While Vercel works every time from the box. Maybe I could dig deeper and try to understand how it works, but I'm super lazy to do that.

    • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs

      yesterday at 6:50 PM

      In my experience it severely lacks on developer experience, compared to Vercel.

    • fontain

      yesterday at 7:02 PM

      Cloudflare’s developer experience doesn’t come close, it is terrible. Cloudflare are working on it, and hopefully they’ll be a real competitor to Vercel on ease of use someday, but right now, it is painful when compared to Vercel. Cloudflare is infrastructure first, Vercel is developer experience first.

      • Onavo

        yesterday at 7:50 PM

        Yes, CloudFlare's full of bugs and sharp edges. Not to mention the atrocious 3MB worker size limit (especially egregious in the age of ML models). They don't mention this up front in the docs and the moment you try to deploy anything non trivial it's oops time to completely re architect your app.

        • kentonv

          yesterday at 8:24 PM

          > Not to mention the atrocious 3MB worker size limit

          That's for the free plan.

          Limits are documented here:

          https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#w...

          • Onavo

            yesterday at 9:29 PM

            Well it's so far from Vercel that it's not even funny any more.

            Good work on workers though, maybe the next generation of sandstorm will be built on CloudFlare in a decade or so after all the bugs have been hammered out.

• kandros

  yesterday at 6:23 PM

  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

  • drewnick

    yesterday at 7:54 PM

    Great point on the playing with Linux growing up, it's second nature to me now.

    I am always feeling like I'm doing something wrong running bare metal based on modern advice, but it's low latency, simple, and reliable.

    Probably because I've been using linux since Slackware in the 90s so it's second nature. And now with the CLI-based coding tools, I have a co-sysadmin to help me keep things tidy and secure. It's great and I highly recommend more people try it.

• gherkinnn

  yesterday at 6:52 PM

  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.

• victorbjorklund

  yesterday at 6:29 PM

  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.

  • glerk

    yesterday at 10:30 PM

    NextJs requires what exactly? Running a nodejs server? I mean yes, it takes a bit more time to set up than one-command deploy to Vercel. But in 2026, even this setup overhead can be cut down to minutes by telling your favorite LLM agent to SSH into your server and set it up for you.

  • Bridged7756

    yesterday at 7:02 PM

    Do you have any examples?. I'm not that acquainted with the pains of deploying Next apps, though I've heard that argument being used.

• kingleopold

  yesterday at 5:15 PM

  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

  • arealaccount

    yesterday at 6:45 PM

    I dunno I put a lot of traffic through Vercel, maybe 100k visitors per day, and it was under a few hundred a month. I think a couple EC2 instances behind a load balancer would cost similar or more. I was under the impression that its still a VC subsidized service.

    They regularly try to get me to join an enterprise plan but no service cutoff threats yet.

• dev360

  yesterday at 5:19 PM

  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.

• glerk

  yesterday at 10:03 PM

  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.

• hdkfov

  yesterday at 6:55 PM

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

• Bridged7756

  yesterday at 5:13 PM

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

• arkits

  yesterday at 5:22 PM

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

• sidcool

  yesterday at 5:40 PM

  Can one host a Next js app on cloudflare?

  • phpnode

    yesterday at 5:42 PM

    yes, https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/framework-guides/w...

    • dennisy

      yesterday at 5:59 PM

      Ohh this is very cool!

  • kstrauser

    yesterday at 7:07 PM

    Maybe. CF’s runtime isn’t perfectly identical to Vercel’s. For instance, CF doesn’t support eval(), which is something you shouldn’t be doing often anyway, but it did mean that we can’t use the NPM protobufs package that’s a dependency for some Google SDKs.

• locallost

  yesterday at 5:30 PM

  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.

• dboreham

  yesterday at 5:32 PM

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

• gjsman-1000

  yesterday at 5:11 PM

  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.

  • jimberlage

    yesterday at 5:16 PM

    Assuming that all homes are at equal risk of being burglarized. In practice the neighborhoods I’ve seen are either at much higher risk or much lower risk.

    • 0123456789ABCDE

      yesterday at 5:33 PM

      and burglarized homes have higher prob. of being burglarized again, and probabilities don't accumulate but compound, and is the server even in a house?

  • FreePalestine1

    yesterday at 5:14 PM

    They didn't imply the box was at their home and that probability is off

  • zuzululu

    yesterday at 6:06 PM

    I definitely do not keep it at home but the thought has crossed me for smaller less demanding boxes.

  • burnte

    yesterday at 5:13 PM

    If they have good backuos, no worries. Mine is in a locked colo cage in a datacenter, so I'm not worried either.

  • loloquwowndueo

    yesterday at 5:47 PM

    That’s not how probabilities work.

    • operatingthetan

      yesterday at 5:54 PM

      Imagining a thief walking in and demanding the home's RAM gave me a chuckle though.

      Thieves probably look for small stuff like jewelry, cash, laptops, not some big old server.

    • zbentley

      yesterday at 5:58 PM

      Or burglars.

  • 0123456789ABCDE

    yesterday at 5:29 PM

    yes, this is indeed how probability works. thanks.

    • operatingthetan

      yesterday at 5:55 PM

      >you’ve got an 8.2% chance of having someone walk out with that box.

      The chance of being burglarized is not the same as the chance that when you are hit, they decide to take your webserver. Think it through.

The original link posted in the post has almost same content: https://vercel.com/kb/bulletin/vercel-april-2026-security-in...

So, the Vercel post says a number of customers were impacted, but not everyone, and they will contact the people that were impacted. I wasn't contacted so does that mean I'm safe?

Another win for self-hosters, I host my own vercel (coolify) and it works well, all under my control and only expose what I want.

We run on Vercel and I wonder if / how long before we're alerted about a leak. Quick look online suggests environment variables marked as sensitive are ok, but to which extent I wonder.

I don't get why everything is not marked as sensitive in env vars by default instead.

Porter also had a breach recently. I assume it is as tightly scoped as they say to not have publicized it.

We proactively rotated keys. Even if you haven’t received an official email, expect customers to inquire about this tomorrow morning.

> incident response provider

So they use third-party for incident management? They are de-risking by spending more, which is a loose-loose for the customers.

• staticassertion

  today at 1:17 AM

  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.

Time to ipo

The point I am taking away here is to never use Vercel's environment variables to store secrets.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416353

Oy vey: https://x.com/theo/status/2045862972342313374?s=46

• rubiquity

  yesterday at 3:40 PM

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

  • dankwizard

    today at 1:13 AM

    He is affiliated with Vercel though

  • threecheese

    yesterday at 3:57 PM

    Almost like that’s his job.

    Hey, I’m with you - I think social media needs to die specifically for this reason. I’m reminded of the term “snake oil” - it’s like the dawn of newspapers again.

    • TiredOfLife

      yesterday at 7:03 PM

      Media as a whole needs to die

      • hoppyhoppy2

        yesterday at 11:28 PM

        Including books and the internet?

Ahhh...another product I'm boycotting, and now doubly glad I'm boycotting.

Well when the CEO of Vercel poses with Netanyahu, a war criminal, in the middle of a genocide... it's going to imply that Vercel has valuable war crime data that people will want to intercept just to bring down Israel's genocidal program.

Reminder the Vercel CEO is a genocide supporter, if you need more reasons to move away from it.

• gib444

  yesterday at 8:01 PM

  You forgot the source to backup your claim

  • ascorbic

    yesterday at 8:56 PM

    https://x.com/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031

That's why infra needs stricter internal walls than normal SaaS

https://x.com/theo/status/2045871215705747965 - "Everything I know about this hack suggests it could happen to any host"

He also suggests in another post that Linear and GitHub could also be pwned?

Either way, hugops to all the SRE/DevOps out there, seems like it's going to be a busy Sunday for many.

• phillipcarter

  yesterday at 3:35 PM

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

  • yesterday at 3:47 PM

  • hvb2

    yesterday at 3:49 PM

    The link at the top of the page it to vercel acknowledging it...

    • phillipcarter

      yesterday at 5:10 PM

      Vercel acknowledges a security incident, which nobody is claiming doesn't exist. What they don't acknowledge are this person's vague implications about impact elsewhere.

• embedding-shape

  yesterday at 3:08 PM

  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?

  • gruez

    yesterday at 3:13 PM

    from his "sources".

    > Here’s what I’ve managed to get from my sources:

    >3. The method of compromise was likely used to hit multiple companies other than Vercel.

    https://x.com/theo/status/2045870216555499636

    To be fair journalists often do this too, eg. "[company] was breached, people within the company claim"

    • eddythompson80

      yesterday at 3:55 PM

      Isn’t he a Vercel evangelist though?

      • TiredOfLife

        yesterday at 7:01 PM

        He quite publicly is not anymore.

      • troupo

        yesterday at 4:05 PM

        He is "whatever gives me short-term boost in popularity". Including doing 180 turns on whatever he's evangelizing or bashing.

        • eddythompson80

          yesterday at 4:10 PM

          Fair enough. That’s probably a better description from what I’ve seen from him. I remember that arc browser shilling.

        • Barbing

          yesterday at 4:37 PM

          Good for the content but would sponsors be on board long term?

        • brazukadev

          yesterday at 5:57 PM

          Let's see. Roasting vercel is more popular than defending but his posts so far he seems to be defending and arguing in the replies.

• recursivegirth

  yesterday at 3:50 PM

  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.

  • rubslopes

    yesterday at 4:37 PM

    I just wanted to chime in and say I think he is knowledgeable; he's not a con. I know you didn't say that, but people might have the impression he doesn't know what he's talking about. He does know, and I've learned quite a lot from him in the past.

    However, since the LLM Cambria explosion, he has become very clickbaity, and his content has become shallow. I don't watch his videos anymore.

    • sgarland

      yesterday at 4:55 PM

      Not that I ever had confidence in his technical knowledge, but it went to zero when he confidently asserted that there was no possible way a single server could handle the massive traffic some NextJS app he had made was serving. He then posted the bill - which was about $5K IIRC - and I was able to determine from the billed runtime and memory that a modestly-spec’d RPi could in fact handle it.

    • well_ackshually

      yesterday at 5:03 PM

      > he's not a con.

      When you're putting the bar that low, sure.

      He's about as knowledgeable as the junior you hired last week, except that he speaks from a position of authority and gets retweeted by the entire JS slop sphere. He's LinkedIn slop for Gen Z.

  • neom

    yesterday at 3:56 PM

    I don't watch his content, but I felt comfortable posting his link as I believe he's generally considered a reputable guy? His tweets sometimes come up in my for you tab and he seems reasonable and knowledgable generally? Maybe I'm wrong and shouldn't have linked to him as a source.

    • steve_adams_86

      yesterday at 4:04 PM

      He's kind of like an LLM in that his content has the surface texture of something substantial, and sometimes it's backed by substance, yet it's often half-true or totally off the mark too. You'll notice if you're previously acquainted with what he's talking about, otherwise he seems to be as you described.

      I don't think he's a bad guy or that he's trying to be misleading. I suspect he wants his content to actually carry value, but he produces too much for that to be possible. Primarily he's a performer, not a technologist.

      • arabsson

        yesterday at 4:19 PM

        I agree with this comment. YouTube's summarize this video feature has been a godsend when it comes to Theo's videos.

    • threetonesun

      yesterday at 4:06 PM

      Nothing on x.com is reputable at this point.

• techpression

  yesterday at 3:38 PM

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

• rvz

  yesterday at 3:07 PM

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

  • pxc

    today at 12:53 AM

    OpenAI owns Contexts.ai, doesn't it?

• nozzlegear

  yesterday at 4:19 PM

  > @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.

  • nozzlegear

    today at 1:20 AM

    Theo subscribers didn't like this one

  • uxhacker

    yesterday at 6:42 PM

    What is AWS level needs?

    • raw_anon_1111

      yesterday at 8:08 PM

      Hell doing this with fixed price AWS Lightsale based services would be better.

    • nozzlegear

      yesterday at 8:07 PM

      You'll have to ask @ErdalToprak on Twitter on that one. I just thought it was funny that this slopfluencer, who's taken money to advertise Vercel, ostensibly believes that using a VPS/k3s is "a stupid take."

Hmmm, the dashboard 404 I got 6 hours ago now makes a bit more sense..

Missing from Glasswing

Looks like their rampant vibe coding is starting to catch up to them. Expect to see many pre vulns like this in the future.

This is why you pay a real provider for serious business needs, not an AWS reseller. Next.js is a fundamentally insecure framework, as server components are an anti-pattern full of magic leading to stuff like the below. Given their standards for framework security, it's not hard to believe their business' control plane is just as insecure (and probably built using the same insecure framework).

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.

https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/rss/aws-2...

• embedding-shape

  yesterday at 3:15 PM

  > 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.

• sbarre

  yesterday at 3:33 PM

  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.

• bakugo

  yesterday at 4:26 PM

  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.

  • qudat

    yesterday at 4:53 PM

    Totally agree. Nextjs is a vehicle to sell their PaaS, every other feature is a coincidence.

    What’s worse is vercel corrupted the react devs and convinced them that RSC was a good idea. It’s not like react was strictly in good hands at Facebook but at least the team there were good shepherds and trying to foster the ecosystem.

Why does anyone running a third party tool have access to all of their clients’ accounts? I can’t imagine something this stupid happening with a real service provider.

I see Vercel is hosted on AWS? Are they hosting every one on a single AWS account with no tenant isolating? Something this dumb could never happen on a real AWS account. Yes I know the internal controls that AWS has (former employee).

Anyone who is hosting a real business on Vercel should have known better.

I have used v0 to build a few admin sites. But I downloaded the artifacts, put in a Docker container and hosted everything in Lambda myself where I controlled the tenant isolation via separate AWS accounts, secrets in Secret Manager and tightly scoped IAM roles, etc.

• eddythompson80

  yesterday at 8:54 PM

  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.

  • raw_anon_1111

    yesterday at 8:56 PM

    Yes the security boundary is the AWS account.

    It doesn’t make sense for a random employee who mistakenly uses a third party app to compromise all of its users it’s a poor security architecture.

    It’s about as insecure as having one Apache Server serving multiple customer’s accounts. No one who is concerned about security should ever use Vercel.

what's the cause of the breach?

There is no serious reason to use Vercel, other than for those being locked into the NextJs ecosystem and demo projects.

• allthetime

  yesterday at 4:00 PM

  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.

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• steve1977

  yesterday at 4:09 PM

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

  • LunaSea

    yesterday at 4:22 PM

    Because Flash apps were so safe.

    • scrollaway

      yesterday at 4:43 PM

      Windows 95 was peak security. (/s)

  • Bridged7756

    yesterday at 7:06 PM

    In C we don't have those issues.

[flagged]

• nikcub

  yesterday at 5:40 PM

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

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

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Much as I want to rip on vercel, its clear that ai is going to lead to mass security breaches. The attack surface is so large, and ai agents are working around the clock. This is a new normal. Open source software is going to change, companies wont be running random repos off github anymore

• sph

  yesterday at 3:52 PM

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

  What's your agenda here?

  • nothinkjustai

    yesterday at 5:11 PM

    The guy has like 10 thousand comments boosting AI and 600 karma, whatever his agenda is people aren’t buying it.

  • bossyTeacher

    yesterday at 3:58 PM

    Paid by a Sama minion, I bet.

  • mikert89

    yesterday at 4:01 PM

    how many recent security breaches have we seen?

    • hansmayer

      yesterday at 8:35 PM

      Most of recent issues, including this incident, happened not due to smart superintelligent "agents" taking over the world - chatbots and other text generators are about as intelligent amd powerful as a dead starfish - but due to the combined stupidity of the said chatbots amd lazy idiots who use them to hide their own incompetence and thus produce such embarassing mistakes. A few years ago, they would be fired for exposing secrets in plain text, but since their manager wanted an AI-Workflow...

    • nozzlegear

      yesterday at 4:16 PM

      How many can unequivocally be attributed to malicious AI?

• Bridged7756

  yesterday at 6:43 PM

  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.

• goalieca

  yesterday at 3:58 PM

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

• tcp_handshaker

  yesterday at 3:45 PM

  >> 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.

• lijok

  yesterday at 3:19 PM

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

  • mikert89

    yesterday at 3:22 PM

    Run ai agents around the clock to do hyper targeted fishing

    • cj

      yesterday at 3:33 PM

      I feel like humans would be better at hyper targeting.

      AI agents have the benefit of working at scale, probably "better" used for mass targeting.

      • mikert89

        yesterday at 3:51 PM

        this like is saying email marketing is done better if you hand write every email. Thats true, but the hit rate is so low, that you are better off generating 1 million hyper personalized emails and firing them off into the ether

        • mcmcmc

          yesterday at 4:24 PM

          As someone who did the former for a couple years, “better off” is subjective and dependent on your business model, particularly for B2B. It’s a trade off like anything else. You may get more leads, but they may convert at a lower rate. Sending at that scale also increases your risk of email deliverability problems. Trashing your domain has more impacts than you’d think. In smaller, targeted markets it even can damage your business reputation and hurt future sales if done poorly; word gets around.

        • cj

          yesterday at 4:29 PM

          If you’re targeting a million people, I wouldn’t consider that a hyper targeted attack.

          But I get your point.

      • freedomben

        yesterday at 3:42 PM

        I disagree. Many humans are phishing in a different language than their native tongue, and LLMs are way better at sounding legit/professional than many of them. The best spear-phishing will still be humans, but AI definitely raises the bar.