Occasional page load failure while logged in? Pretty common. Complete or nearly complete failure for logged-in users? Happens sometimes. Completely down such that not even a logged-out user can read it? I'm not sure I've ever seen that.
Has it bothered someone? Probably not.
In all my years, HN has been down just once.
I notice short term outages every couple months. They usually don't last long.
I wonder if Reddit is ever going to fix their "you broke reddit" thing. I probably see that page a couple dozen times a year, and it's been going on since, what, 2014? Earlier maybe? It's like the Twitter fail whale. Except Twitter fixed their site.
Don't you mean a couple dozen times per day?
I use HN a lot and it is very rare that it is down, and then only for a short period of time. (Not a very exact metric).
I do get an occasional no-response from firebase, but my guess is that this is really on my ISP. Again, that is also quite rare.