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Exactly ... we've got Ansible scripts that do that. One of the current Java rockstars (not my description), Adam Bien, recommends pulling the source code for all third-party dependencies to build them locally and put them in a local repository. I suppose you can push directly back upstream to avoid having an extra step.

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For OS-level package management like Apt or Yum this is less of an issue, but for things like Composer, Gem, NPM and the like, is the concept of "closest available mirror" even a thing?

I guess for mission critical applications you could have a local mirror of all your vendor package dependencies (probably not a bad idea) but I would bet most people don't do that (I don't)..

If you're using Java most of the build tools use the Maven repositories, for which you can set up a local mirror too. The company i work for runs a Sonatype Nexus so we're not really affected by others' downtime unless we need stuff that we hadn't ever used before.

Yes, for our Java projects we have a Nexus repository which mirrors everything locally. It doesn't protect us from someone deleting a project ... then we're stuck on the last available version without a way to address issues, but it's worked pretty well so far.

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