Stack Overflow Is Down | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow Is Down

stackstatus.net

176 pointsqsantos115 comments

I always got a chuckle out of the joke that StackOverflow devs must be the best devs because when StackOverflow goes down, they don't have StackOverflow to look at for answers, haha.

You just made me spray my laptop with coffee. Such a good one!

There are mirrors and offline archives of the site.

That was also a joke at Google

Google might make your resume look better, but jokes don't work like that.

The joke is not that Google developers are so good. Rather, the code base and infrastructure at Google are not the industry standard, so googling to solve your issues wouldn't help you very much. However, Google does have its own internal search engine, Moma, that fulfills a similar role, and code search is also heavily relied upon as well. Google developers fear the day when both of these could go down.

I believe a coffee maker is humankind's finest engineering, then: A machine that can be used by a person who hasn't had coffee.

"Those who most need coffee are the least qualified to brew it." -- me, after forgetting to put the pot under the filter when attempting to make coffee in the office.

Or are they at serious risk of not being able to bring it back online again? All the solutions are offline now as well…

A status page that is down at the same time as the real website is not a good status page...

Yeah. There was someone a few years ago who said something like, "If your website doesn't have a status page, it does have one on Twitter". Wish I could find the quote source.

They have a twitter account for status updates, and that's not been updated since September: https://twitter.com/stackstatus

I believe the implication is that the rest of the world will complain about your service's status on Twitter.

Sadly, it's now a matter of time before Twitter itself goes down. (Due to running out of money, staff getting fired, mismanagement, etc.)

It's been a matter of time for a long time.

Likely it's hosted on the same infrastructure. The general recommendation is to host the status page on different provider so it's more likely to stay up.

The pinned tweet for @StackStatus starts "With our recent status page improvements".

https://twitter.com/StackStatus/status/1575844926884962305?s...

The old status page https://stackstatus.tumblr.com is up, but not updated.

The medium is the message.

Maybe the Status page is down and the site is up? :-)

I was trying to use SO for the first time in months (got a really freaky problem with jestjs) and it was down.

It successfully tells me that the website is down

It makes perfect sense:

Create a static status page on yourserver.com/status.html and write:

If you can't read this, it means the status of yourserver.com is: DOWN

DNS should have a mechanism for designating failover IPs, so you could e.g. host a static HTML saying "it's down" on some CDN as far as possible topologically from the rest of your network, so it displays when your status page is down too.

However, status pages are first and foremost marketing tools, so I wouldn't expect anyone setting such mechanism up.

You know, there's a proposal of treating HTTP names the same way SMTP works. That proposal includes adding low-priority servers that should be used only when the high priority fails.

All the mainstream browsers have already said they won't ever implement it.

I suppose that gets filed next to "browsers should really let us use SRV records to point at websites":\

SRV records are the thing I was talking about.

Oh, neat! Thanks for pointing that out; I somehow got this far in life without realizing that SRV records have priority and weight fields (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record has a decent summary) - I only knew that they let you specify a port, which would already be a huge advantage. Darn, now I'm even more annoyed that browsers don't handle them:(

> All the mainstream browsers have already said they won't ever implement it.

Do you know what is their rationale?

The one rationale I know is that there is a competitive issue, where the first browser to adopt it will have slightly slower page loads, but won't gain anything yet because no site uses it.

The slightly slower page loads is one extra round trip to the DNS server (that is supposed to be close to you). It can be solved at the DNS side, and last time I looked, about a decade ago, was indeed solved at the default configuration of most open-source servers. But the large providers don't use the default configuration of their servers.

Use another site for the status page, and frame or iframe the on-site status page. If the frame doesn't load, it means the server is down.

https://httpstatusdogs.com/417-expectation-failed

By the way

  Start time: June 15, 2023 | 9:00pm
  End time: June 15, 2023 | 10:00pm

  We are performing a software upgrade
  on network equipment that will cause
  some traffic to be dropped for about
  1 minute, during the device restart.

I wonder which time zone. No idea where they are in the USA.

> Planned maintenance scheduled for Thursday, June 15, 2023 at 21:00 UTC

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/maintenance+...

It tells me:

    Start time: June 15, 2023 | 11:00pm
    End time: June 16, 2023 | 12:00am

So I guess it's in our time zone? I'm in GMT+2.

Yep. I mean, it's nice that we don't have to do the timezone math, but they still should include the timezone to avoid confusion.

Automatic time zone translation is moronic if you don’t indicate that automatic translation has happened before displaying it to the user.

Also, assuming that the time zone set on the client machine is the same that the reader expects is usually true, but not always.

There’s a reason most technical or “professional” communication of time zones happens in UTC, and the conversion is left up to the reader.

This is one of those UI conventions that would be good, but is actually unusable and ruined because there's too much other bad UIs that don't even think about time zones.

I wish people would just also always publish GMT - timezones are the freaking worst.

They commented on that and said:

> The downtime we just experienced wasn't related to this maintenance. We'll be posting the details shortly.

Mandatory reminder that you can download StackOverflow for offline use (at least, you can once it's back online):

https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/10/20/introducing-the-overfl...

https://download.kiwix.org/zim/stack_exchange/stackoverflow....

You would definitely be an elite at your job for situations like this...

Awesome! Thanks!!!!

> you can download StackOverflow for offline use

Probably not for long. They've already discontinued the public data dump: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-da...

They should set up an old-style MSDN service where CD-ROMs arrive in your mailbox every month.

That's unfortunate. At least you can still get May's dump which has plenty of material.

They did not discountinue it. They are uploading June data dump and it's expected that the automatic data dumps are re-enabled by end of day Friday: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/390200

No Reddit, no Stack Overflow. Thankfully, documentation and manuals are still on various platforms and not a single website.

Crap, ChatGPT is down too, guess I'm not getting anything done today.

you were not getting anything done anyways with that

You are using it wrong

Or they're just doing something that's actually original and doesn't appear in the training data a million times already.

Why are you doing something that hasn't been done a million times before? Suspicious. You're using it wrong.

I'm probably doing my whole profession wrong. I should just shit out cookie cutter web apps and try to sucker VCs into funding them, just to make off with the dough. I could do it all from my couch now. ChatGPT webapp, ChatGPT some slides and stuff and just hire an actor to go do the pitch meeting in California for me.

Check my comment above.

Let's check one of today's 450 useless Twitter threads about how to use it the right way, then.

How about not being negative and sarcastic about this?

I’ve found practical ways for example mass data manipulation tasks where GPT saved me quite a lot of time.

You can find smaller tasks in your workflow as well which can be outsourced to GPT.

How is "you're using it wrong" anything other than negative and unconstructive? You reap what you sow.

I mean you are right, but do we really want to keep being snarky or maybe we can course correct and try being productive instead?

> single website

Many many projects host on readthedocs.com. So that's another major failure point.

It's good practice to keep docs on your own machine... no need for it to be only available online.

Agreed. I do that when possible.

Most SO pages can be viewed with google’s cached page feature.

I've been using the same programming language for the last 20 years. I don't need any of that crap :-Þ

First reddit and now Stack Overflow? Rough couple of days for anyone googling things.

I had a bash question for ChatGPT earlier and I opened with "Okay, it's just you and me now..."

I've been plugging search engine result links for reddit and stackoverflow into archive.org to "bypass" - works more or less.

For the moment:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

One unexpected benefit of LLM (to me) is that it memorized large parts of the internet, so it has some backup like properties. SO is down, but ChatGPT memorized it already.

It may have memorized it, but recollection with accuracy is not it's strong suit.

> SO is down, but ChatGPT memorized

memorized SO, also known as "stole". when i (and everyone else) write for SO, i give them permission to use what i write, but never did I sign up for the GPT theft of that data.

You gave them permission to use it, and they used it in such a way that GPT benefits from it as training data. I'm sorry you misplaced your trust in Stack Overflow for not protecting your public writings. Knowledge is awesome, though, in that it's like a candle and by lighting a new flame, your initial candle is not diminished in any way. It's not even your sole candle but merely one in a roaring bonfire.

> misplaced your trust in Stack Overflow

that's a great way to put it, I'm very disappointed they aren't the ones to innovate in this new direction, even though people gave them all the power (and data) to do it. Which they chose to give away to "Open" AI aka Microsoft and now spend their time bickering over GPT detectors and writing nonsensical CEO "vision" posts.

Basically, they really are now in a position to fizzle away at this rate, which is a shame, because I believe a community of acknowledged authors is a much more appealing way to advance knowledge than Microsoft anonymously milking the world for their sole profit and credit.

Your content is licensed with https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ when you submit it to SO to host and share.

You agreed that gpt can use it, so long as it includes attribution, and specifies when it makes changes

> so long as it includes attribution, and specifies when it makes changes

Does it, though?

Yeah definitely. My default thought process was always, ok I'll just get a cached version, but now it's like - lemme see what GPT-4 thinks about this problem first.

Yes that is one of the cool side benefits i see too. It's like lossy compression for knowledge.

Although, I mean that more in the sense we can have an entire (text) internet search engine on a phone, rather than it being a full backup.

what? just click on "cached", SO doesn't just drop out of google

One day ALL websites will go down worldwide and stay down. Could be today, could be 50 years in the future. Make sure you have a LOT of books you look forward to reading. "The Road" is not just a parable.

I think it's more likely they will go down because we have replaced them with something as far beyond websites, as websites are beyond books.

But books are not down. Why would websites go down?

Interestingly, I’ve noticed a significant drop in stackoverflow results when I Google in the recent months. Can’t really attribute it to anything, but an honest word sometimes I don’t use SO for weeks.

I'm curious how the status page is down too. Those pages are usually in a totally separated infrastructure.

Looks like they use FireHydrant (https://firehydrant.com/) for their status page. But if FireHydrant is having issues, they'd need Stack Overflow. It's a terrible coincidence.

hug of death?

They SHOULD be on separated infrastructure.

Sometimes your separated infrastructure is not as separate as you think. True story. Northwest Airlines (prior to merger with Delta) was grounded for a couple of days in the 90's due to a backhoe cutting through their data and communication lines about 300 yards from their control center. Both vendors were using the same utility right of way. So separate systems, separate vendors, separate cables buried in the ground next to each other. One backhoe operator took them both out.

As of now, 3:46 PM GMT, stack overflow is up and not just read-only, I am able to comment.

Goddamnit, I found an answer and then edited it with a link to the upstream docs yesterday, and wanted to find that link again.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72440961/how-to-connect-...

Outlink to https://downdetector.com/status/stackoverflow/ since their native status checker (stackstatus.net) is also down!

After some time, I got a "We are currently offline for maintenance" message.

When Twitter was new, it was down every few weeks. It wasn't a big deal though. Turns out you can be down for 87 hours per year and still have >99% uptime.

How many people's first reactions were "it might as well stay down because I just go to GPT-4 now instead"? /s

I wonder how much their traffic is down overall.

One joking theory as to why various CDNs were having issues on Monday is because their engineers usually turn to Reddit for answers...

So is the status page from the looks of it.

This outage seems to only affect users who are logged in. Try a private browser window if you need access.

Nah. Doesn't seem to matter.

It went to read-only status before going down, so I assume it's a planned maintenance event.

What a waste of empty space, I have to scroll to find the information..

With all that's going on around LLMs and the fact that SO has been a major source of data, when I see SO down now, I wonder if they haven't just pulled the plug. I know it's a dumb thought, I'm curious if other people feel the same way.

Just dump something you purchased for $1.8 billion?

I'd do it, if I expected to charge $18 billion for information that the thing I just purchased used to offer for free.

To have/sell exclusive access to AI companies.

There's limited value if the site isn't continuing to amass new human-generated content. An "AI" that can only answer questions about technologies used until June 2023 will probably not change the world in the long term.

Not fully down for me, just very slow?

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

Hopefully it's enjoying a comfortable retirement now that GPT is here.

GPT probably generates a lot of its programming related answers based on StackOverflow. I wonder what the quality of GPT would be for future developers if SO did retire!

Oh no, half of hackernews population will be jobless!

thank god ChatGPT has read all of SO

confirmed.

It's kind of surprising how relevant so many of my queries are to SO answers these days. This was kind of eye-opening. I wonder if I should start trying Bard or ChatGPT first?

Yes.

I agree. ChatGPT is a really good first place to start with a technical question, so long as the tech is mature enough. I’ve even given the LLM updated docs for a library that had changed since it had run its learning, and it was able to update the example to work with the new api based on the docs.

Can you rephrase this? I'm having a hard time parsing it. Maybe I just need more coffee :)

They're trying to say SO answers are helpful to them, but in a very odd way.

I was surprised to see how many of my searches were landing on SO this morning. It stood out because the site was not responding. Apparently, it was a stupid thing to say...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com