Is HN Down?

Obviously it isn't. But my question is why this question gets so many upvotes every time a site that isn't responding immediately to someone on the Internet, and their immediate reflex is to ask HN if it's down. Like "Yay, I'm the first to notice! Did you?"

It reminds me of when we used to get excited every time modem downloads reached a certainly high cps. It is meaningless and even expected every once in a while.

It seems like a really strange behaviour to me, and it is an HN trope by now for something that is a genuinely uninteresting question. Especially since it sometimes it's just their own ISP or whatever.

Should I be posting my download speeds to keep them excited?