Seems to be AWS-related. Nothing on their status page yet, but people's personal health dashboards are reporting another networking outage
Do businesses that run Node.js use some sort of caching proxy to protect from cases like this, or does npm make something like that difficult to implement?
Generally Docker. We install all required node deps during our docker build to ensure that running the platform does not require npm.
Makes sense. Using Docker would make sure you can deploy existing software.
NPM being down would prevent upgrading libraries or rebuilding the Docker image, but that'd only be a problem if NPM was down for a long time.