9 ms·
Tell HN: HN was down
- 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/ 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301823 (1:39:59 PM GMT). The last comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301848 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.
- markus_zhang 10mo agoYes was down for me. Ontario, Canada.
- spooneybarger 10mo agoYes
- ortusdux 10mo agoLooks like 3 hrs https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/incidents/yaz-eOJeARBL https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/incidents/yaz-eOJeARBL https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news Strangely, nothing from the statuspal, which is the first google result https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/ https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/
- rozenmd 10mo agoInterestingly it stayed up if you weren't logged in.
- jedberg 10mo agoIf you aren't logged in you get a cached version from the CDN/cache. Reddit works the same way.
- davnicwil 10mo agothat'll be because it's served from cache when you're not logged in
- smallerize 10mo agoThat only worked for a while, eventually I couldn't load comment pages even logged out.
- bryanrasmussen 10mo agoalso went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well. on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.
- Izkata 10mo agoNot completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).
- cess11 10mo agoThat's how I concluded that it wasn't a ban on my account but rather more serious.
- zelphirkalt 10mo agoYep "having trouble serving my request" or so.
- sltr 10mo agoYeah I couldn't log in for a bit this morning. It's concerning how often and how many times I tried. Glad it's resolved.
- manbitesdog 10mo agoTIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex
- numpad0 10mo agoobligatory: https://xkcd.com/477/ https://xkcd.com/477/
- kevin061 10mo agoI did not know how addicted I was to HN until today lol
- thesurlydev 10mo agoSame! Right there with "every day must begin with coffee"
- AndrewKemendo 10mo agoIt just reinforces for me that addiction is a human problem not a problem with technology I know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patterns but yet here we all are
- chistev 10mo agoIt's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities. It's understandable to be addicted. Lol. I visit this place multiple times a day.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- fwip 10mo agoIt's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.
- sosodev 10mo agoYes, and I'm a little ashamed to admit my morning routine wasn't the same without it.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- busymom0 10mo agoI run the app called HACK and received user emails that the HN website was down.
- maverwa 10mo agoThank you for HACK. I love it!
- silverpiranha 10mo agoYes, was down for me too this morning
- rzerowan 10mo agoYes
- voxleone 10mo agoYes, it' been out for me too, southern hemisphere, GMT -03
- FergusArgyll 10mo agoYeah & chatgpt was trying to gaslight me - claiming it was my fault. Happy to put that bum in its place...
- chistev 10mo agoYou use ChatGPT to know if a site is down?
- gjsman-1000 10mo ago[flagged]
- null_deref 10mo agoCould this be a self-inflicted bug? In that case, the broader point still stands: cloud providers can cause outages that are outside your direct realm of responsibility.
- gjsman-1000 10mo agoYour VPS server and your data center and the ISP your data center uses and the AS system your ISP uses all can cause outages outside your direct realm of responsibility.
- DonHopkins 10mo agoIt's absolutely irresistible downvoting people who preemptively complain about being downvoted like you do. It really made my day. Post another complaint so I can do it again please! It's not knee jerk when you explicitly ask for it, by leading with a complaint about downvoting, instead of just making your point and letting it fall or rise on its own merits. You're the one who put the idea of downvoting you into my head in the first place.
- abujazar 10mo agoUnless the downtime was caused by something Cloudflare would've prevented, this downtime would've happened regardless of being behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare adds another single point of failure.
- Jtsummers 10mo agoComplaining about downvotes usually gets you more downvotes, so the response here isn't really that surprising.
- Aachen 10mo agoKeep in mind that votes aren't supposed to be about whether you agree or disagree, but whether a comment adds substance to the thread. A good question that makes a wrong assumption can be worth upvoting; a correct but fairly irrelevant statement about politics not (to give a relatively obvious example) Being "voted to -2" doesn't necessarily mean you were wrong (it often correlates though). People might just think it wasn't relevant in whatever context you posted it in I often find it hard to tell what makes people think something I write is not helpful (or sometimes also a comment someone else made) and thus appreciate comments that clarify constructively. It can also help to ask for clarification if you're particularly surprised about the votes on a given post
- wavemode 10mo agoWhen it was down my thought was "damnit, I'll actually have a productive workday now."
- dwa3592 10mo agohahaha
- tzs 10mo agoNext time you can avoid that fate by opening HN in a private browsing (or whatever your browser calls its equivalent) window. This outage, like the vast majority of HN outages, only affected logged in requests. I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.
- neom 10mo agoIs it my imagination or did they used to automatically serve you a logged out page when it was down?
- dpoloncsak 10mo agoHuh. Dunno why, but when it failed on Firefox I tried Chrome, and it worked. I wrote it off as a Mozilla issue, but this would better explain that I think
- ycombinator_acc 10mo agoI couldn't access it in private or regular.
- ashf023 10mo agoYes, and on one request I saw a message like "Restarting server - this won't take long", and soon after it's back up.
- wek 10mo agoYes, it was down for a few hours
- whatevermrfukz 10mo ago[flagged]
- zzixp 10mo agoFirst AWS/Azure/Cloudflare and now HN?!?
- imiric 10mo agoWe can live without the former, but not HN!
- gjsman-1000 10mo agoYou won't be employed without the former.
- philipwhiuk 10mo agoTime to update the meme: https://preview.redd.it/cloudflare-had-a-rough-day-today-and-lot-of-us-have-felt-it-v0-x26encesx02g1.png?auto=webp&s=173af4140ab3770be1fef7abfe5c2bb5a8d6709a https://preview.redd.it/cloudflare-had-a-rough-day-today-and...
- whatevermrfukz 10mo ago[flagged]
- fatty_patty89 10mo agoI got irrationally angry when it refused to load the website
- DonHopkins 10mo agoYou handle your irrational anger much better than whatevermrfukz who keeps pooping his pants.
- fatty_patty89 10mo agoInteresting that you mention that, how do you keep track of his comments? Some sort of plugin/scraper?
- Jtsummers 10mo ago> how do you keep track of his comments? You can just look at them, turn on showdead in your profile and you'll see a bunch of flag-killed comments in this discussion by whatevermrfukz. No need for a plugin or scraper.
- fatty_patty89 10mo agothank you
- _f9cu 10mo agoyou could refuse to be angry to mock it
- pedro380085 10mo agoYes, I got an error message, but I cleared my cookies and was able to access.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- whatevermrfukz 10mo ago[flagged]
- DonHopkins 10mo agoI remember my first beer.
- null_deref 10mo agoThat Markov chain spiraled out of control
- rolandog 10mo agoPerhaps Grok was not trained to go so much time with 0 responses due to the downtime?
- ProofHouse 10mo agoI wake up, and look at HackerNews lol. This morning sucked hahaha
- bennydog224 10mo agoYes, I had to touch grass this morning.
- whatevermrfukz 10mo ago[flagged]
- stevenjgarner 10mo agohttps://www.stevenjgarner.com/HN-Down-2025-12-17-07-48-UTC-0600.png https://www.stevenjgarner.com/HN-Down-2025-12-17-07-48-UTC-0...
- numpad0 10mo agoCould have been accidental flagging of sorts. Didn't work on PC for few minutes while showing fine on phone.
- chistev 10mo agoIt was the first time since I started using this website (August last year) that it was down. I'm still impressed nonetheless. I'd like to know what caused the outage and how it could have been prevented, for learning purposes.
- esafak 10mo agoA lot of the outage indicators failed. Someone needs to create an outage indicator reliability dashboard.
- Nextgrid 10mo agoA lot of them got fooled by the caching; pages for signed-out users are cached heavily and those kept returning successful responses even if the actual backend server was down.
- chistev 10mo agoAnd an outage reliability indicator for that outage reliability indicator.
- willis936 10mo agoWe apologize again for the fault in the fault indicator. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
- arionmiles 10mo agoSo a downdetectorsdowndetector.com but for Hacker News?
- al_borland 10mo agoIs 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 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?
- zipy124 10mo agohttps://hn.hund.io/ 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.
- lagniappe 10mo agoThis site said HN was fine and green the entire time it was down.
- laCour 10mo agoThis was monitoring the unauthenticated news page, which is why it didn't catch it. It now monitors authentication as well. It is not official, and was made by a co-founder years ago.
- eddyg 10mo agoThanks! I checked that page and wondered why it stayed green. I resorted to checking https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news
- FuriouslyAdrift 10mo agoOnly way I have figured out how to to change the "Following" sort order back to chronological is from the mobile app: click the down arrow on the "Following" tab. Change the sort from "popular" to "most recent." Seems to reset it on the web view, too.
- rob 10mo agoMaybe 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 https://x.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236?s=46
- pcdoodle 10mo ago[dead]
- dhruv3006 10mo agoI was quiet surprised really. HN almost never goes down.
- Aachen 10mo agoYou don't visit enough my friend :) It's down about 8.4 minutes per week. On 26% of days it doesn't work at least once, and on 12% of days it has more than one consecutive failed check. The longest uptime streak was 24 days I've been keeping track since exactly 2 years (to the day!) because I was surprised that it seemed briefly down for me on a daily basis. Was I getting unlucky and hitting it every time, or was it just down very often? Nobody posted anything so I started answering the question for myself :p I've been meaning to post the tracker to HN but there's a pesky bug I want to fix: the "is it currently down" stat. I don't know how this is beyond me but something in the code bugs out. So this is my first time posting about it
- ayewo 10mo agoWould love to see it when you do get round to posting it :)
- thatgerhard 10mo agoThought for a second I got banned for something lol
- elxr 10mo agoI thought I was being rate-limited for opening posts too fast, which has happened before. After more than an hour I thought, "wow this is pretty harsh" and "so much of my exposure to learning things is directly tied to HN posts". I was lost lol.
- Aachen 10mo agoYour comment history doesn't sound IP-ban-worthy. Is there an alt that has you worried? :P
- verzali 10mo agoMe too and I was wondering what I did!
- khaledh 10mo agoIt was down if you tried to access it while authenticated (i.e. you have a cookie). It was loading fine for unauthenticated sessions (e.g. incognito).
- Elfener 10mo agoI got stuck in an infinite loop. Try opening HN -> it's down, better check HN to see everyone talking about a major website being down -> Try opening HN -> loop
- neom 10mo agoYeah me too. Wake up -> HN down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> loop. That was a few hours ago. I'm glad this loop is broken.
- squeefers 10mo agosounds very much like an evil social media dopamine feedback loop. ironic given everyone on HN is so anti social media.... its clearly only bad for kids though i should add, silly of me to exclude such a detail
- neom 10mo agoI've been on this internet hit shit since the 90s lil bro, s' all good.
- strbean 10mo agoI can stop any time I want, I just don't want!
- bee_rider 10mo agoHN is obviously social media and it is silly to say otherwise. It is just social media that occasionally has interesting stuff. The SNR is just slightly higher.
- ptsd_dalmatian 10mo agoI guese developed this addiction on Facebook and now that I don’t use it, I come for methadon shot to HN
- neurolesudiste 10mo agoYup, France here , Paris 1809. HN was down about an hour ago. Glad to see it back ! Cheers.
- sangeeth96 10mo agoThought it had something to do with some model updates, like Gemini Flash 3 for a moment.
- neurolesudiste 10mo agoHi, Got an error an hour ago on phone, not loged. Anyway, glad to see you back. Paris 1812. Cheers from France.
- gaigalas 10mo agoI got confused by the "minutes ago" thing. Working with full dates in the HTML and doing a tiny JavaScript that calculates the "minutes ago" would actually be a neat improvement.
- liampulles 10mo agoSmart. Have to use that error budget before year end...
- dylan604 10mo agoI always hated the late use-it-or-loose-it at the end of the year where you end up buying the things that were denied requests from earlier in the year. You just cost me half a year of using the damn thing.
- wiredpancake 10mo agoThis problem is really bad at my work. We commonly run into finance issues about half way through the year. We get to the point where 10x HDMI cables get declined from Finance and we get reprimanded for not tracking where each HDMI or Ethernet Cable go. Near to the end of the year, the budget refreshes and finance (without consultation to us) ends up buying a bunch of random stuff. "Guys, we brought 11 iPad Minis that need to be setup" Oh so we can also get the HDMI cables now? "No sorry, we just spent all the remaining money, have you audited the cables recently?"
- arbirk 10mo agoWe need a serious post mortem for this
- rustaceanU32 10mo agoI'll admit this ruined my morning
- ajdude 10mo agoI was able to view the site without being signed in (i.e. private window) but any browser I was logged into wouldn't load. I'm sure it's a coincidence but it started working again shortly after emailing hn@ycombinator.com
- agumonkey 10mo agohn applied ycombinator too strictly
- russellbeattie 10mo agoHN being down makes you start wondering about the differences between routine, addiction, compulsion, and habit.
- PurpleRamen 10mo agoIn other words, productivity in tech skyrocketed for hours..though it seems some work was flavoured with irrational anger.
- gepiti 10mo agoAthens, Greece yes it was down.
- SilverElfin 10mo agoI tried to refresh an embarrassing amount of times
- Kim_Bruning 10mo agoIn with the rest, yes, and my first thought is always "I have an internet outage" when HN is down. :-P
- danielfalbo 10mo agoAs soon as I noticed it was down I came to hacker news to post about it, but...
- dvaun 10mo agoWill we get a post mortem?
- laCour 10mo agoI'm with Hund. Our hn.hund.io page did not catch this because it was requesting the cached, unauthenticated page. It now monitors authentication as well.
- jonahx 10mo agoIs this a mistake by hund, or the configuration of hund by HN?
- laCour 10mo agoMistake on our part (Hund) for not monitoring authentication. This page is unofficial and was made by a co-founder several years ago.
- joncrane 10mo agoThank you. I was thinking myself or my corporate IP was shadowbanned
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Cheer2171 10mo ago[flagged]
- sentrysapper 10mo agoWhat a rude thing to post. Hund, don't listen to this entitled nonsense. There is a reason it's called human error. Companies 100x your size and 10000x your revenue like AWS, Microsoft, CloudFlare, CrowdStrike can't figure out how to accurately provide status dashboards. At least you took the time to explain your mistakes. If anything you got another supporter for your honesty.
- seanw444 10mo agoThis just in: people make mistakes on occasion.
- 10mo ago
- arm32 10mo agoThe "site status" apps are all smoke and mirrors, how unreliable.
- oidar 10mo agoWhat was the longest that HN has been down? I feel like this is up there.
- xxs 10mo agoPSA - if you delete your cookies, HN gets it easier. Or just test it in a private window. It did work without being logged on. The auth service appeared to be down as the log in attempt (just showing the page) failed.
- scottydelta 10mo agoNow it makes sense. I was puzzled about why it was working on the phone browser and not on my system. I'm logged into HN on my system.
- dang 10mo agoYes, sorry! We're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago. (The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.) In this case, we also 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. I'll add more as we find out more, but it probably won't be till later this afternoon PST. Edit: later than I expected, but for those still following, the main things I've learned are (1) pkill wasn't able to kill SBCL this time - we have a script that does that when HN stops responding, but it didn't work, so we'll revise the script; and (2) how to get PagerDuty not to let you go back to sleep if your site is actually still down.
- shmeeed 10mo agoLooking forward to the post mortem. :)
- michelsedgh 10mo agodang
- shmeeed 10mo agoIn my defense, I was commenting at 0 min, since then he made several updates explaining the situation.
- dang 10mo agoYes sorry! Normally I put in "[editing - bear with me...]" or some such.
- michelsedgh 10mo agoI was just trolling, thanks for ur work
- steve_adams_86 10mo agoI was fortunate enough to get to watch a bunch of kids racing and bouncing in bouncy castles in our school gym during HN's downtime. It's not that much different from HN, come to think of it. (ha, ha)
- bossyTeacher 10mo agoI have never before seen this website down.
- khobragade 10mo agoMan if I had a coin every time I email the mods and this thing goes down, I'd strangely have two coins.
- whynotmaybe 10mo agoI Still found it funny that we have downdetector, downdetectordowndetector, downdetectordowndetectordowndetector,... (I lost count) but downdetector doesn't detect HN's status.
- dustfinger 10mo agoIt would be a nice feature if hackernews had a simple news.ycombinator.com/status page that I could trust. I don't like loading those some-sketchy-domain/status-right-now sites.
- mmooss 10mo ago> news.ycombinator.com/status page That's not so useful when news.ycombinator.com is having problems.
- dustfinger 10mo agoTrue. how about https://ycombinator-status.com https://ycombinator-status.com or https://status.ycombinator.com 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.
- codyklimdev 10mo agoI thought HN traffic got blocked on my work's network for a second, phew! My lunch breaks would've gotten a lot more dull.
- complianceowl 10mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Aperocky 10mo agoDuring that time I couldn't load HN web page, but my HN CLI tool could connect to HN: https://github.com/Aperocky/hnterminal https://github.com/Aperocky/hnterminal, but only read.
- ramonga 10mo agowhen I realised the api still worked I put this together https://hackernewsx.com https://hackernewsx.com just to realise it will just work if I cleared my site data.
- hmans 10mo ago[dead]