cult-ui is returning HTTP 429 for everything: all 6 cult-ui showpieces are broken right now

[AnayDhawan]

Found while verifying registry refs on 2026-07-31. cult-ui.com returns HTTP 429 for every request, not just registry endpoints:

site root:      429   https://www.cult-ui.com/
docs page:      429   https://www.cult-ui.com/docs/components/texture-card
registry entry: 429   https://www.cult-ui.com/r/texture-card.json

Persistent across repeated attempts and across different entries, and the very first request of the session was already 429, so this is not self-inflicted rate limiting from hammering. The response body is an HTML error page, not JSON, so npx shadcn add fails on it.

Impact

All 6 cult-ui showpiece entries are currently unusable: dynamic-island, shader-lens-blur, canvas-fractal-grid, texture-card, typewriter, animated-number. That is 6 of 39 showpieces, roughly 15% of the registry, failing silently for any user who asks for one.

Why this matters beyond the outage

This is exactly the failure #3 (scheduled soft-fail registry health check) exists to catch, and it went unnoticed. It was found by hand, incidentally, weeks before anyone looked. The growth plan lists registry rot as traction risk #1 and 21st.dev already flipped auth-gated once. #3 should be treated as a genuine pre-launch gate, not a nice-to-have.

Next steps

• Re-check whether this is a transient rate limit or a persistent block (could be geographic, could be a bot filter reacting to a datacenter IP).
• If persistent, either document the breakage on the affected entries or route them through a mirror the way the 21st.dev entries already are.
• Land Scheduled soft-fail registry health check #3 so the next one surfaces automatically.

Related: #3, #20, #18.

[AnayDhawan]

Confirmed from GitHub Actions runners, so this is not local to one network or a self-inflicted rate limit: the first scheduled-style run of the new health check (#3, merged in #32) hit the same HTTP 429 on all 7 cult-ui targets from a completely different IP.

Checked 44 targets: 37 ok, 7 rate-limited, 0 dead, 0 error.

The check auto-filed #33 with the full table, which is the loop working as intended. Monitoring continues weekly, and #33 will close itself if cult-ui recovers.

Still open here: decide whether to mirror or annotate the 6 affected entries if the 429 persists past a couple of weekly runs.