Now they’ve taken their whole site offline, presumably so they won’t have to answer any questions.

Tea is just all over the damn floor at this point.

...but like... what did they think was gonna happen? Did they think they were so clever that no one could figure it out? Even when it effectively broke functionality on sites that used it but were blocked? Like they couldn't add in code to disable specific parts of it if it was deployed on one of those sites so they could keep the whole thing secret? Like just another little regex search string to ignore any users and sites that match the site domain as its rolling out, so they would keep using it and be none the wiser because it would work for them but continue to have its blocklist maintained and secret because it wouldn't cause any problems.

I hate that it takes me like zero effort to conceptualize a better way to have done this shady shit, but on the other hand I guess I'm just glad they weren't that clever.

EDIT: Upon reflection, I do wonder if this was at least partially vibe coded, because LLMs don't have forethought and can't plan ahead for contingencies like that. Because it also seems like a no-brainer that it would lead to configuration failures if deployed on one of the sites that is blocked.