by mikiem on 3/15/21, 10:11 PM
Founder and CEO of M5 Hosting here. We did have a network outage today that affected Hacker News. As with any outage, we will do an RCA and we will learn and improve as a result.
I'm a big fan of HN and YC in general, we host of other YC alum, and I have taken a few things through YC Startup School. During this incident, I spoke to YC personally when they called this morning.
by drusepth on 3/15/21, 9:17 PM
HN is one of the few sites I always keep zoomed-in (around 200%), which led to me finding an interesting bug in Chrome while HN was down: Chrome's internal "This site can't be reached" page uses the zoom level of the site you would be visiting (if it were up), rather than Chrome's default zoom.
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/VwFtgQh.png
by symisc_devel on 3/15/21, 9:05 PM
by alvatech on 3/15/21, 9:16 PM
I think I have tried to visit HN for more than 10 times in last 2 hours and failed. This made me realize how much I'm addicted to HN
by hnrodey on 3/15/21, 9:24 PM
Had me quite confused because I'm also having home internet issues. I was trying to get my laptop to switch to my mobile hotspot and HN is one of the sites I used to test connectivity because a) it's almost always available and b) loads very quick.
A bit of a mindfuck trying to assess my actual internet connectivity via a site that was also down : )_
by koolba on 3/15/21, 9:17 PM
The title should be updated to "Productivity was up".
by yawnxyz on 3/15/21, 9:15 PM
my fingers automatically just start typing in "news.y" when I'm idle, I definitely didn't know what to do when greeted with a 404!
Is there any way to put the HN homepage on an edge cache so at least the homepage shows up? Or am I admitting that I'm addicted to checking HN too many times a day?
by coding123 on 3/15/21, 9:24 PM
I never expect HN to be down... I asked my wife - hey is the internet down? She said - no, it's working for me. I clicked on another site and my mouth dropped.
by ibraheemdev on 3/15/21, 9:21 PM
It says a lot that @hnstatus has not tweeted since 2018.
by tiffanyh on 3/15/21, 11:10 PM
@dang
Would love an updated post on what the current hardware / software stack that’s running HN.
It’s been years since I’ve seen a post/comment on this topic.
Are you still running FreeBSD, on a few high frequency cores (iirc)?
by 2bitencryption on 3/15/21, 9:16 PM
by tartoran on 3/15/21, 9:40 PM
Seeing HN unresolved was a bit weird as it is the best performing site I ever visit on my low bandwidth phone so several times I thought the problem was on my end. But in the end it helped me realize how frequently I dial into HN while it was down. I have a bit of a problem and I think I need to turn on that no procrastination flag on.
by tpowell on 3/15/21, 9:57 PM
I've been on this site 12+ years, and I don't ever remember it being down. I assumed we were under nuclear attack.
by technick on 3/16/21, 12:02 AM
HN is my homepage and when it wouldn't load, I told my coworkers the internet was down and took a 3 hour lunch.
by ibraheemdev on 3/15/21, 9:40 PM
by fabbari on 3/15/21, 9:14 PM
It's seems an odd coincidence of this and the Azure AD outage -- I was trying to get to HN to see what people were saying about it!
by fotta on 3/15/21, 10:09 PM
by JasonFruit on 3/15/21, 9:31 PM
I thought pg posted "Memphis".
by spondyl on 3/15/21, 9:34 PM
I didn't notice unfortunately due to the Azure outage blowing everything up :(
by bombcar on 3/15/21, 9:14 PM
So strange that this coincided with Azure authentication eating it.
by enobrev on 3/15/21, 10:08 PM
The one time I'm actually reading HN for actually relevant information for actual work, it's down for half a day. Made for a great excuse to take a nap.
by PhilosAccnting on 3/15/21, 9:28 PM
I have a massive learning project[1], and I think 2/3 of my "to get through as soon as sensible" content is news.ycombinator links.
Needless to say, this site is my own personal StackOverflow, and I think there's something about ingratitude bouncing around in my mind somewhere.
[1]https://github.com/PhilosAccounting/ts-learning
by rattray on 3/15/21, 9:13 PM
Is HN fully back? Looks like this was a little less than 3 hours total, is that right?
by tomxor on 3/15/21, 10:05 PM
Funny, my first thought was "oh no they've blacklisted VPNs", can't remember when HN was ever down!
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 3/15/21, 9:51 PM
It did not seem to affect the Firebase feed.
by protomikron on 3/15/21, 9:58 PM
Curious, what is the uptime of HN - is there some data about that?
My guess is around 99.9% ... but maybe that's too optimistic?
by southerntofu on 3/15/21, 9:39 PM
Who needs so many 9's when there's actually interesting content we keep coming back for?
by vincentmarle on 3/15/21, 9:43 PM
We also had issues with our YC application earlier today, was that related to this issue?
by Koshkin on 3/15/21, 11:59 PM
It’s OK. The skies haven’t fallen. (And I was able to accomplish something today.)
by aritmo on 3/15/21, 9:19 PM
There was a noticeable increase in productivity during the last hour or so.
by kenm47 on 3/15/21, 10:05 PM
It's 3pm.... do you know where your servers are?
by peanut_worm on 3/15/21, 10:32 PM
And now it looks like there is an outage at reddit
by tempestn on 3/15/21, 9:30 PM
Is this related to the big Microsoft outage?
by deepsun on 3/15/21, 10:22 PM
If only they used Kubernetes! /s
by 0xbadcafebee on 3/15/21, 10:27 PM
by nickthemagicman on 3/15/21, 10:46 PM
This site is so reliable, I thought my I.P. had gotten banned.
