Ask HN: Why was HN down for the past 6 hours?

14 points·Aachen··6 comments

Not sure when it came up again, I probably last checked 2h ago. It was down from two vantage points in European countries. The site is now also extremely slow (ten seconds to load a page containing one comment). I'm surprised not to see an announcement, or a post on HNStatus.

What's up? Did/do others not experience this?

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When it was down for me, I wound up at a cloudflare landing page. I checked, and sure enough, they seem to be behind cloudflare now: news.ycombinator.com is an alias for news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.

Is that a new thing?

I thought they were behind the great internet MITM box indeed, so imagine my surprise to be getting normal connection timeouts. I actually thought maybe they stopped being behind CF!

Today, yes it hanged whilst trying to load. And there's no Big News I can think of that would slow HN to a crawl (AKA cascade effect). I checked Twitter for 'hackernews down' and a few people reported outages, but not too many tweets like in some of the famous outages where HN was offline for 24 hours and Twitter was buzzing with people complaining.

There was definitely a problem: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

I was getting cloudflare errors (IIRC 503 or 502) suggesting they are using a content cache that couldn't reach the hackernews backend.

Yeah I did

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