Someone was using Cursor, an AI code editor, to write a Roblox cheat. The AI-generated code contained a logic error that hammered Vercel's edge network with requests until it buckled. What started as a side project became a platform-level outage.
The incident sparked arguments about Vercel's environment variable security. Developers discovered that the "sensitive" checkbox for environment variables is just a UI control. It makes values write-only in the dashboard so you can't view them after setting them. All env vars are encrypted at rest. The checkbox doesn't add encryption. Some developers assumed it did. It doesn't.
Cursor wrote broken code that scaled. An infinite loop with no exit condition, hitting Vercel's deployment endpoints in a tight cycle. Each iteration fired requests faster than the system could respond. The kind of error you'd catch in a basic code review. But when AI generates code fast enough and nobody reads it, simple mistakes slip through. And this one took down infrastructure used by thousands of developers.