I can access HN just fine, but I get the same result from curl: $ curl -I https://news.ycombinator.com/ -k HTTP/1.1 501 Not Implemented Server: nginx D

I can access HN just fine, but I get the same result from curl: $ curl -I https://news.ycombinator.com/ -k HTTP/1.1 501 Not Implemented Server: nginx Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:59:39 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 174 Connection: close You could try doing custom HTTP requests via telnet: $ telnet news.ycombinator.com 80 Trying 184.172.10.74... Connected to news.ycombinator.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET / <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>nginx</center> </body> </html> Connection closed by foreign host. Since HN redirect everything to HTTPS it doesn't tell you much, but it can tell you for example whether a connection to port 80 is going through. Edit: You have to type the "GET /" <return> part, in case that wasn't clear. The rest is server response.