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Srinathprasanna N S
Srinathprasanna N S

Posted on Originally published at Medium AI-assisted

Five MCP servers were archived 17 months ago. Their downloads have quadrupled since.

#security #mcp #npm #ai

What your agent reads, part 6. You approve an MCP server once. This series is about what happens after.

On 29 May 2025, the Model Context Protocol project archived 14 of its reference servers. The commit is titled "Archive unmaintained servers". Five of them, GitHub, Postgres, Slack, Puppeteer and Brave Search, are still among the 30 most-downloaded MCP server packages on npm. Those are the five I followed.

Their npm packages are still there. Each is marked deprecated, with the same line: "Package no longer supported. Contact Support at https://www.npmjs.com/support for more info." Each README still shows the npx -y line to install it.

So I looked at what happened to them after they stopped.

They kept growing

In June 2025, the month after the archive, the five got 407,645 downloads between them. In July 2026 they got 1,794,602. Since June 2025 the total is about 17.7 million.

In the last week of October 2026, those five plus CircleCI's npm package, which CircleCI deprecated in August in favour of its hosted server, got 632,516 downloads.

Downloads aren't users. CI jobs and mirrors count too. But a package nobody used wouldn't grow more than fourfold since it was archived. People are still setting these up, and some of them are setting them up today.

For fairness: the maintained ones grew faster. server-filesystem, which the project still maintains, went from 174,541 to 2,499,106 a month over the same period. The archived ones are riding the same wave as MCP, just more slowly. Nobody is pruning them.

The one with the bug

In August 2025, Datadog Security Labs published a SQL injection in the Postgres server. It wraps every query in a read-only transaction, which sounds safe. But a query can start with COMMIT;, which ends that transaction, and everything after it runs with whatever rights the database user has. Their example was COMMIT; DROP SCHEMA public CASCADE;.

Here is the part I didn't expect. The fix exists. It was merged into the servers repo on 29 May 2025, the same day the server was archived. It was never published. The version npm serves today, 0.6.2, is from December 2024, before the fix.

When Datadog wrote it up, that package was getting about 21,000 downloads a week. In the last week of October 2026 it got 164,787.

Why nobody notices

When you install it yourself, npm does warn you:

npm warn deprecated @modelcontextprotocol/server-postgres@0.6.2: Package no longer supported.

But the usual install path for an MCP server is a config block you paste, and the client runs npx for you in the background. I ran it that way. On the first start, npm prints the warning to stderr, which the client sends to a log, not to your chat. On every start after that, npx uses its cache and prints nothing at all. The server starts, the tools show up, and your agent uses them.

That's the same shape as the rest of what I've been measuring. You approve a server once, and nothing after that asks you to look again. Most of my posts are about servers that change after you approved them. These are the opposite: servers that stopped changing, including the fix.

What you can do this week

  1. Search your MCP configs for @modelcontextprotocol/server-. Then run npm view <package> deprecated on each. Anything that prints a message is no longer maintained.
  2. Replace GitHub first. Its own README points to github/github-mcp-server.
  3. If you run the Postgres one, connect it with a role that can only read. Don't rely on the server's read-only mode; give the database user SELECT and nothing else. Datadog's write-up names a maintained fork with the fix, and says to avoid the deprecated server for any database where writes should be prevented.
  4. Pin what you keep. A deprecated package won't change under you, but the replacement will.

How I counted

npm registry for the versions, dates and deprecation text; npm's download API for the counts; the GitHub API for the archive commit and the fix's merge date. npm's daily figures have gaps in October (days reported as zero), so I used the last full week without gaps (26 October to 1 November), and the 17.7 million is a floor.

The numbers and sources are here: https://github.com/gawk-dev/mcpgawk/tree/main/research/deprecated-servers-2026

Do you know which of your MCP servers are still maintained? I didn't, until I checked.

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