zlacker

Tell HN: HN was down

submitted by uyzstv+(OP) on 2025-12-17 16:48:18 | 599 points 309 comments
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- HN errored on all authenticated requests with 502 Bad Gateway. It did still respond to a limited amount of unauthenticated requests with presumably cached pages, which did not get updated. The last post on /newest claimed "0 minutes ago", but was actually much older (1:32:57 PM GMT) and not the newest post.

- This status page actually identified the outage: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/ - Pages by Hund and Statuspal did not show the outage.

- The last post before the outage was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301823 (1:39:59 PM GMT). The last comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301848 (1:41:54 PM GMT).

- There was an average of ~4 seconds per comment just prior to the outage. Based on this, HN likely went down at 1:41:58 PM GMT.


NOTE: showing posts with links only show all posts
3. ortusd+q[view] [source] 2025-12-17 16:50:12
>>uyzstv+(OP)
Looks like 3 hrs

https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/incidents/yaz-eOJeARBL

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

Strangely, nothing from the statuspal, which is the first google result

https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/

26. steven+n3[view] [source] 2025-12-17 17:01:12
>>uyzstv+(OP)
https://www.stevenjgarner.com/HN-Down-2025-12-17-07-48-UTC-0...
37. al_bor+74[view] [source] 2025-12-17 17:03:32
>>uyzstv+(OP)
Is this still a valid account for HN status? It says it’s the official one, but with the changes at Twitter to no longer show chronological feeds (at least for users that aren’t logged in), it’s rather useless. The top 5 listed post (for me) are seemingly random from 2014 - 2022.

https://x.com/HNStatus

Is there a better place to check, beyond a basic down detector that may provide more insight or signal that the outage is acknowledged?

39. rob+i4[view] [source] 2025-12-17 17:04:08
>>uyzstv+(OP)
Maybe PG is more involved now and hired the "10,000 lines of AI code a day" person who made a deployment mistake?

https://x.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236?s=46

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42. philip+v4[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 17:04:40
>>zzixp+h2
Time to update the meme: https://preview.redd.it/cloudflare-had-a-rough-day-today-and...
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48. zipy12+R4[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 17:05:41
>>al_bor+74
https://hn.hund.io/ Is a status page, no idea if official or not, but it didn't register here for some reason.

I didn't read the post text, it's identified there haha, my bad! I wish the text post text wasn't grey, I gloss over it too easily.

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61. dizhn+L6[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 17:13:09
>>Nextgr+B4
This site also got it right: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

I believe it's because they accept user reports.

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80. 1shoon+ma[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 17:26:30
>>manbit+F
If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down.

https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

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99. numpad+5g[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 17:50:03
>>manbit+F
obligatory: https://xkcd.com/477/
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127. eddyg+Qm[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 18:20:22
>>laCour+ug
Thanks! I checked that page and wondered why it stayed green. I resorted to checking https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news
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171. alwa+LF[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 19:43:31
>>andy_p+DC
I can’t put my finger on anything within the last decade, but I seem to recall it running in something close to its current form on a single core on a single server for a long time:

>>5229522

Re: traffic, dang said (2022):

>>33454140

I took it as a good reminder that the hard part is the human part: that high-overhead features and UI fripperies are nice but not necessary (or sufficient) to keep a community healthy and vibrant over the decades.

(And on the subject of the human side, if you didn’t catch Anna Wiener’s 2019 profile, it’s here:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... )

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184. geocra+5L[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 20:08:14
>>idontw+OH
My organization is, for now, using OpsGenie.

My pager noise: https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossin...

That will not only wake the dead, it'll wake me no matter how asleep I am.

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187. Imusta+DL[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 20:11:01
>>dang+zk
I was personally worried if there was some major outage of the whole world or something the first time hackernews didnt work because I didnt expect hackernews to go down but rather, something even more catastrophic than aws going down must happen (because we see major cloud outage posts)

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

This website had many instances of reports, the last I saw were 52 reports in only a short frame of time, the maximum reports on this are 118 it seems.

> In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.

Its okay I suppose, have you figured out who is crawling hackernews so much tho, was it a ddos attack or an AI company trying to get data, doesn't hackernews support an api and I am sure that there are datasets for it too so Its interesting why they might crawl but we all know the reasons why as they have been discussed here.

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191. Imusta+eM[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 20:14:41
>>tom133+5E
mine already has and I dont even have hackernews as my new tab :)

On all fairness though, mine is same for the original comment where just pressing n autocompletes it to https://news.ycombinator.com/

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197. alexfo+gO[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 20:24:00
>>al_bor+74
https://xcancel.com/HNStatus only uses chronological ordering (after any pinned tweets) and that has the last message 12 Dec 2023.

(Basically whenever you see an x.com link just change it to xcancel.com and avoid the nonsense.)

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203. sgeren+uR[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 20:42:08
>>kunwon+oN
Doctors on call at hospitals also routinely still use pagers. There was a planet money episode on it a couple years ago: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/08/1197955913/doctors-pagers-bee...
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204. maxloh+NS[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 20:49:53
>>dang+zk
Frankly, I don't understand why someone would even try to crawl Hacker News.

There is an official dump which doesn't even require parsing HTML at all: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...

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208. dustfi+uV[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 21:04:09
>>mmooss+4M
True. how about https://ycombinator-status.com or https://status.ycombinator.com. They can drop that link on their official ycombinator.com site just so it is easy to tell that it is legit when they are not down. They can maintain the status for all of their official sites there. Well, with the exception of ycombinator-status.com of course. I guess they can post that status on some-sketchy-domain/status-right-now - LOL!

Maybe ycombinator does have an official status page somewhere, but it is not easy to find if that is the case.

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226. dang+171[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 22:04:14
>>al_bor+74
We post there when we know we're down and it may take more than a few minutes. But in this case we didn't know! >>46303196
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231. dang+E81[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 22:14:50
>>maxloh+NS
These are not, er, experienced crawlers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbpl3ywNlpA#t=56s

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234. Errone+e91[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 22:17:02
>>kunwon+oN
There's a company in England called "Cascode" who make firefighter alerters. These are really basic "beeper" pagers, which you can program to have a bunch of different tones and LED patterns based on the RIC and Subcode.

I look after several thousand of these across several hundred paging sites.

They're relatively inexpensive (70 quid or so in quantity) and they last about six weeks on a commonly-available AA battery. The batteries go flat enough to trigger the "low battery" beep at about 3am, for some reason. I don't know why.

There's no messaging involved, although the encoders are capable of sending a text string. The message is "get up and get down to the fire station right now", which generally needs no further explanation. POCSAG is unencrypted, so there would be privacy concerns with sending actual incident information in the clear with it.

While we're on the subject of old tech, until BT finally cut the last of them off, we use dialup modems to control the encoders (not dialup internet, just a hundreds-of-miles serial cable) as a backup, and dot-matrix printers to print out a hardcopy message for the crews to pick up.

All very low-tech. All very fixable. All stays working if you don't mess with it.

https://cascode.co.uk/products/2ar2-and-2ar3/

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239. dang+nb1[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-17 22:28:44
>>tsouka+KF
Yes, sorry! This is the problem - we don't want to block legit users, but if we loosen the bolts, we get flooded.

If you browse HN while logged in, that should immunize you against this happening. Also, if it does happen again, you can unban your IP as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. But you have to do that from a different IP address, of course.

If those things don't work, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll get it sorted.

261. Aperoc+pw1[view] [source] 2025-12-18 01:03:10
>>uyzstv+(OP)
During that time I couldn't load HN web page, but my HN CLI tool could connect to HN: https://github.com/Aperocky/hnterminal, but only read.
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276. dang+4W1[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-18 06:00:48
>>wkat42+ws1
Thanks, I'll take it! except for the single-handedly part - gotta share the love with https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=tomhow.
285. ramong+uf2[view] [source] 2025-12-18 09:26:03
>>uyzstv+(OP)
when I realised the api still worked I put this together https://hackernewsx.com just to realise it will just work if I cleared my site data.
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295. chesch+q73[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-18 15:34:54
>>notach+RR2
Don’t let me distract from this learning opportunity with my armchair expertise. There are a lot of articles out there for this exact topic, but here’s one that’s pretty good.

https://relevancerecovery.com/habit-vs-addiction/

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303. mgarci+xx4[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-18 21:58:19
>>1shoon+ma
I've made https://deja.de.hueve.ar/hn so it snapshots the frontpage once per day - that way, I now there won't be new updates during the rest of the day, and the dopamine addiction goes down.
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304. dang+We5[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-12-19 03:42:48
>>lockni+ec2
Aw, please don't cross into personal attack. You can make your substantive points without that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit, unfortunately. Could you please not do that? We end up banning accounts that keep doing it and I don't want to ban you.

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