Rather it's the sensational they-killed-RSS! aspect of the story that attracted attention, because it ties in with the generic topics of RSS-lamentation and web-nostalgia which are perennially popular here (plus the word 'killed' evokes indignation, which invariably attracts upvotes).

I'm not mocking those feelings—I share them! I just think there's a binary outcome here: either Reuters is truly killing their RSS, in which case we can discuss that once we know it; or (more likely) this was just a bug somewhere, and that is not SNI (significant new information) which could support a substantially different discussion. For more on SNI, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Actually, the 'bug' interpretation does relate to the RSS-lamentation topic in a more subtle way. Software that's low-priority never gets as much maintenance attention. Perhaps someone made a change that broke the RSS feed, but no one noticed because they didn't test that.