In practice, cloudflare or AWS down means half the internet doesn't work at all. The half that works - routing around problematic networks - isn't very helpful when the problematic networks are the useful ones.
If someone chooses to host their service relying on a single unreliable point of failure that's on them. Plenty more hosts on the web.
It's also one of the least reliable and performant public forums I've ever used. It goes down or slows down several times a week for me. Wish they'd just move it to the cloud instead of occasionally upgrading the bare metal...
dig SOA news.ycombinator.com
; <<>> DiG 9.18.16-1-Debian <<>> SOA news.ycombinator.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 10818 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;news.ycombinator.com. IN SOA
;; AUTHORITY SECTION: ycombinator.com. 900 IN SOA ns-225.awsdns-28.com. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 86400
;; Query time: 39 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) (UDP) ;; WHEN: Wed Oct 25 10:52