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Vercel April 2026 security incident

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Re: Vercel April 2026 security incident

#73
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.

Re: Vercel April 2026 security incident

#74
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.

Re: Vercel April 2026 security incident

#75

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.

MBP - M4 Max - Chrome 146.0.7680.178.

No crash.

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

Re: Vercel April 2026 security incident

#76

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?

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.

Re: Vercel April 2026 security incident

#77

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?

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.

“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”

Re: Vercel April 2026 security incident

#78

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 a…

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?

Re: Vercel April 2026 security incident

#79
post #61
post #14

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,…

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 com…

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.

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