What the data says

We read 6,205 public posts from builders whose apps broke at or after launch and verified 659 recent cases. Deploy and build problems are the largest group, at 25%. Of the 659, 89 verified cases are this pattern: the release is blocked or never goes live.

From the builder's side it looks like this. You push, the pipeline ends in success, you refresh, and the old page is still there. Sometimes there is no deployment at all, or the new frontend is live and calls a route or column that does not exist yet. Sometimes half your users get chunk load errors and the other half are fine.

The common thread is that nothing in the pipeline was checking what production serves.

Reproduce it

Two small mistakes, both common on Next.js with Vercel or any similar host.

The first is a caching rule added for performance that matches everything, pages included:

// next.config.js module .…