Why Axios v1.1.0 Broke Thousands of Sites and How to Fix It

Axios is a popular Promise‑based HTTP client that works both in browsers and in Node.js.

On the server side it uses the native Node.js module, while in the browser it relies on XMLHttpRequest.

It is bundled with vanilla JavaScript, Vue, React and Node.js projects, and can make requests with less code than the native Fetch API.

Recently, a serious issue occurred with Axios 1.1.0: the published package was corrupted, causing thousands of websites to fail.

One user reported that after updating to v1.1.0, axios.get was undefined, producing a TypeError: axios.get is not a function and breaking all requests.

The problem can be reproduced by loading the library via a script tag:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/dist/axios.min.js"></script>
<script>
  axios.get(...);
</script>

Earlier versions such as 1.0.0 do not exhibit this bug.

Developers who rolled back to 1.0.0 saw the issue disappear, though some could not immediately downgrade due to app review processes.

Some commentators argued that developers who rely on automatic CDN upgrades bear responsibility for the outage.

The Axios team confirmed the bug and released two quick patches, v1.1.1 and v1.1.2, urging all users to upgrade.