Hacker News Reader

It seems like that was their attempt to "shutdown" the site. It's a pretty effective way too... The easiest way to stop the stampede was to drop off the net completely. By tweaking their dns, they were able to give themelves enough room to breathe. Then they could slowly start to bring people back.

That's just a guess. But from their post, it seems reasonable.

This was a result of us throttling traffic to the site - not the original outage.

Or maybe disabling DNS was how they purposely took down the site, then slowly let people back in, as they said.

DNS was never mentioned in that post. Further it's a curious way of controlling flow, though I suppose in a moment of panic...if nothing else works...

Perhaps the DNS issue was their way of shutting off the site.