- Yes, 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, 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.
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.
- I 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
by manbitesdog
17 subcomments
- TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex
- Yes, and I'm a little ashamed to admit my morning routine wasn't the same without it.
by al_borland
4 subcomments
- 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?
by liampulles
1 subcomments
- Smart. Have to use that error budget before year end...
- When it was down my thought was "damnit, I'll actually have a productive workday now."
- 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/
- 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
- A lot of the outage indicators failed. Someone needs to create an outage indicator reliability dashboard.
by steve_adams_86
0 subcomment
- I 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)
- Yes, and on one request I saw a message like "Restarting server - this won't take long", and soon after it's back up.
- Yeah 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.
by dhruv3006
1 subcomments
- I was quiet surprised really. HN almost never goes down.
by danielfalbo
0 subcomment
- As soon as I noticed it was down I came to hacker news to post about it, but...
- PSA - 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.
by dustfinger
1 subcomments
- It 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.
- I 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.
by codyklimdev
0 subcomment
- I thought HN traffic got blocked on my work's network for a second, phew! My lunch breaks would've gotten a lot more dull.
- First AWS/Azure/Cloudflare and now HN?!?
by PurpleRamen
0 subcomment
- In other words, productivity in tech skyrocketed for hours..though it seems some work was flavoured with irrational anger.
- 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.
- I 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
- It 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.
by whynotmaybe
0 subcomment
- I Still found it funny that we have downdetector, downdetectordowndetector, downdetectordowndetectordowndetector,... (I lost count) but downdetector doesn't detect HN's status.
by stevenjgarner
0 subcomment
- https://www.stevenjgarner.com/HN-Down-2025-12-17-07-48-UTC-0...
by fatty_patty89
2 subcomments
- I got irrationally angry when it refused to load the website
- It 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).
by zelphirkalt
0 subcomment
- Yep "having trouble serving my request" or so.
by Kim_Bruning
0 subcomment
- In with the rest, yes, and my first thought is always "I have an internet outage" when HN is down. :-P
- Could have been accidental flagging of sorts. Didn't work on PC for few minutes while showing fine on phone.
by russellbeattie
0 subcomment
- HN being down makes you start wondering about the differences between routine, addiction, compulsion, and habit.
by khobragade
0 subcomment
- Man if I had a coin every time I email the mods and this thing goes down, I'd strangely have two coins.
- 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.
by sangeeth96
0 subcomment
- Thought it had something to do with some model updates, like Gemini Flash 3 for a moment.
- I run the app called HACK and received user emails that the HN website was down.
by pedro380085
0 subcomment
- Yes, I got an error message, but I cleared my cookies and was able to access.
- The "site status" apps are all smoke and mirrors, how unreliable.
- What was the longest that HN has been down? I feel like this is up there.
- Will we get a post mortem?
- Yes, it' been out for me too, southern hemisphere, GMT -03
by neurolesudiste
0 subcomment
- Hi,
Got an error an hour ago on phone, not loged.
Anyway, glad to see you back.
Paris 1812.
Cheers from France.
by SilverElfin
0 subcomment
- I tried to refresh an embarrassing amount of times
by bossyTeacher
0 subcomment
- I have never before seen this website down.
by rustaceanU32
0 subcomment
- I'll admit this ruined my morning
- We need a serious post mortem for this
by neurolesudiste
0 subcomment
- Yup, France here , Paris 1809.
HN was down about an hour ago.
Glad to see it back !
Cheers.
by silverpiranha
0 subcomment
- Yes, was down for me too this morning
by markus_zhang
0 subcomment
- Yes was down for me. Ontario, Canada.
- Yes, it was down for a few hours
- Athens, Greece yes it was down.
by thatgerhard
3 subcomments
- Thought for a second I got banned for something lol
- hn applied ycombinator too strictly
- Yes
by spooneybarger
0 subcomment
- Yes
by ProofHouse
0 subcomment
- I wake up, and look at HackerNews lol. This morning sucked hahaha
by complianceowl
0 subcomment
- I was convinced that I got banned lol.
by bennydog224
0 subcomment
- Yes, I had to touch grass this morning.
by FergusArgyll
1 subcomments
- Yeah & chatgpt was trying to gaslight me - claiming it was my fault. Happy to put that bum in its place...
- I'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.
- [dead]
- [dead]
by gjsman-1000
6 subcomments
- [flagged]
by whatevermrfukz
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by whatevermrfukz
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by whatevermrfukz
1 subcomments
- [flagged]
by whatevermrfukz
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
Hacker News