This is kinda what a status page is for, not the HN front page - linked being down is nothing new - it’s why we moved our stack away to AWS, what, seven years ago? Well, that and the horribly overloaded switches and poor implementation of the Xen packet scheduler that caused unacceptable latency spikes to memcached.
It’s great for hosting toy sites that sit on a single box and don’t have an uptime SLA - and people saying “well it’s cheap” - moving to AWS saved money, as we had to run big linodes for the workload purely for the additional internode bandwidth.