Due to a (catastrophic) hardware crash, this site will be closed

I've noticed in the past on Hacker News comment threads about Amazon AWS, or other cloud services, that a common theme is that "EC2 is expensive, just buy a dedicated server from OVH/Hetzner!"

This is why some use EC2: it is trivial to snapshot and backup block storage, it is cheap to store snapshots, and recovery from a catastrophic hardware crash will take minutes.

I hate to be that guy, but this time I can't help it:

Anyone has any insights as to why something this mundane could make HN front page?

what was that site about ?

Looks like the UVA online judge system, a practice website for ACM ICPC competition questions.

Sucks if they lost data, a lot of people are very proud of their account history on there. It says closed for "a few days" though, not forever.

ACM online practice site. It's huge, used by the competitors all around the world.

Anyone with insight on what happened exactly?