Why does anyone care? These posts are getting increasingly popular. It seems like reputation-bait to me and really detracts from coming here to do what we do - read articles.
I was using wikipedia at the time and went to IRC to find out what's up, but not everyone will go that far or think to look at the status page. I don't know what downforeveryoneorjustme would return in this case -- I did not think to check the headers being returned.
If there were a karma-donation mechanism, I'd give you the 20 points or so I've gotten out of this for making a good point. :)
Why would anyone go on hackernews to check if a website is down? That doesn't make much sense, there are so many mechanisms out there to deal with this kind of thing....