On Friday, thousands of NFTs that had once sold collectively for millions of dollars vanished from the internet and were replaced with the phrase This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflares basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service. The pictures eventually returned but their brief loss, as a result of one of the services that served the NFTs being migrated to a free account, is a reminder of the ephemeral nature of digital goods as well as the craze for crypto-backed pictures that dominated the internet for a few years.The pictures were part of a CloneX RTFKT (pronounced artifact) collection, a Nike-backed NFT project done in collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. They disappeared because the corporate overlord that acquired them was no longer investing the time or capital into the project it once had.At around 5 a.m. EST on the morning of April 24, more than 19,000 NFTs in the CloneX RTFKT (pronounced artifact) collection vanished. In their place was white text on a black background that said: This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflares basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service.The pictures linked to a URL on Cloudflares site that explained a bit more about what was going on. If you are on a Free, Pro, or Business Plan and your application appears to be serving videos or a disproportionate amount of large files without using the appropriate paid service as described below, Cloudflare may redirect your content or take other actions to protect quality of service, it said.One of the original pitches of NFTs is that they would live forever on the internet. The idea is that they were a digital asset, as good as a real world asset like gold or silver, and could never be destroyed or erased. The flicking out of some 19,000 NFTs and the erasure of tens of millions of dollars in Etherium called that into question.https://x.com/PixOnChain/status/1915352785626845289NFTs are non-fungible tokens, which use the blockchain to prove the ownership of digital assets. In the speculative frenzy that followed, a lot of people got rich minting grotesque pictures and selling them online. The trend peaked around the start of 2022 when Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton talked about the then-popular Bored Ape Yacht Club on the Tonight Show.Nike bought RTFKT in 2021 when corporations and investors thought NFTs would be the next big thing. No one knows what Nike paid for the company, but earlier that year Andreeseen Horowitz had valued RTFKT at $33 million and RTFKT used that number to raise $8 million in capital.Three years later, Nike decided to pull the plug and sunset the project. At the time, Samuel Cardillo was RTFKTs CTO and the man in charge of keeping things running. At its height, Cardillo had a team of 12 people helping him run the project. Now its just him. He stayed on as a consultant after Nike said it wouldnt support the project anymore.Hes currently in the process of migrating Nikes NFTs off of a DigitalOcean cloud server and onto AWS. I, personally, wanted to decentralize the assets instead of moving them just to yet another centralized hosting which would be under someone elses will, he said.But Nike gets the final say, even now.He was using Cloudflare as a third-party service to secure inbound and outbound connections from the user to DigitalOcean. The plan was and is to use this as a bridge while he decentralized the pictures on ArWeavea blockchain for data storage.According to Cardillo, the images vanished because Cloudflare moved RTFKT onto a free plan earlier than he expected. The reason we're moving to the free plan is that, RTFKT is sunset, there are no plans to do any drops or anything like that so having a paid plan with Cloudflare makes absolutely no sense anymore, he told 404 Media.https://x.com/cardillosamuel/status/1915331631998500879?s=46Cardillo posted about the issues on RTFKTs Discord and fielded questions on X while he got the pictures back online. I understand the panic, he said. Its my duty to ensure that those people can be reassured, its part of my responsibility being in charge of all of this.Around the same time that the NFTs vanished, some of the people left holding the RTFKT bag filed a lawsuit against Nike. An Australian resident filed the class action lawsuit in Brooklyn, New York federal court. It said that the shoe company ending support for the NFT company led to significant losses for people who had bought them.Cardillo declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said he still believed in the technology underlying NFTs. I hope people see the point of this technology itself and stop using it to fuel the casino that crypto became, he said.