Walrus does not get tested by a takedown email first. It gets tested by a "can we ship this?" message while everything still looks green.
The file loads. Then it does not suddenly. Then it loads again.
Shards exist. Thresholds are not crossed. Repair is running. So nobody wants to say the scary word. And yet the release doc gets a hold-step anyway, because the only thing worse than a 404 is a "works on my side' week that turns into screenshots.
My first instinct is to call it congestion. Bad timing. Weekend churn. Move on.
Then it repeats in the same shape, inside the same Walrus availability window... right up against an epoch boundary.
This is where it gets slippery. Nothing was deleted. Nothing is "blocked". But reliability turns selective. Data that's still there starts behaving like it has preferences. Slow here. Flaky there though. Retrievable, technically, but not something you'd sign as usable inside a window you're accountable for.
So what are we actually shipping.
On Walrus, that fuzziness comes from mundane places. Someone's serving path is busy. A gateway is hot. Retries pile up and suddenly the "one file" becomes ten requests. At the same time, repair work is chewing bandwidth and attention because the system is trying to stay above threshold, not make your front end feel smooth.
Operators In Walrus still have to pick priorities. Repair queues still pick winners. Recovery traffic still competes with normal serving when the network isn't having a neat day. None of that needs a villain. It just needs enough friction that "permissionless" turns into "it works… when it works'.
And once serving gets intermittent, the only thing users experience is what they can fetch right now. Not what's reconstructible. Not what's "supposed" to be available. Just what loads in reality.
Now the awkward questions show up, late, in the wrong meeting.
Is this just churn, or did we drift into a state where some content is effectively harder to fetch than other content?
If a partner asks "is it available"... are we answering with evidence or vibes?
Walrus is annoying in the practical way... durability is paid for in participation and repair work, and you don't get to hand-wave that cost away when the network feels slightly painful to run. The blob can still be there. Reconstruction can still be true.
The ticket still does not move. The hold-step stays. Nobody wants to sign 'dependable' and mean it when the best sentence you've got is, it should come back if you keep trying. Or… it did for me.