I restarted my phone because I thought my network was down blindly believing HN can never be down. Then I opened another website and realised this is one of those times that the website was actually down.

Personally I like https://dnscheck.tools, it checks a few other things as well like DNSSEC and IPV6

For a very simple site, https://captive.apple.com works too

Back in the day (90:ies) a colleague at the ISP I was working at (small time dial up business) told me that the one site on the Internet you could count on always being up was playboy.com. Therefore, it was our standard "check if Internet is working" site. In the event that it was a DNS issue, it was also best to memorize its IP.

For some reason, knowing the IP number of playboy.com by heart was not a skill I bragged about a lot :P

These days it's 1.1. Easier both to remember and type than anything else.

I used to have a smartphone plan that throttled to 100kbps after I used my data. At that point, for the rest of the month I would usually live with it because HN and google maps still worked even when every other site wouldn't load.

You should rethink that. HN is slow and/or down all the time.

May I suggest https://lite.cnn.com/

https://perdu.com is a good move too

It was our internet that broke.

It’s not fast and always up. It’s down more than all other websites in my top 10.

I thought that a stupid comment i made got so downvoted that the backend broke