It's because I finally made an account today after reading the site for like 15 years. Apologies.
Welcome.
The fact that I had to finally place the site's IP into my own dns table / host file before cloudflare would resolve the link and cry "it's not them it's the host" ... tells me a lot. cloudflare snafu from my perspective, otherwise in 20 seconds I should have seen host issue whine.
Also a few up or down sites resolved the site was up.
Seems HN was down for 1hr, 9min (Yes, I monitor my favorite website :-D)
@dang: Can you share anything? Your work is appreciated as always!
Email hn@ycombinator.com if it goes sideways again ;)
Our FreeBSD server suddenly rebooted itself and we didn't have notes on exactly what to do in that case*. Unfortunately for you all, I was the only HN sysadmin around—there exist other, much better ones—and it took me a while to figure out the sequence. Then a helpful colleague asked a good question that triggered the right memory in my brain, and poof we were back up.
* (since some of you are about to ask—yes, we do now)