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Posted by uyzstvqs 12/17/2025

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/ - 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.

599 points | 327 commentspage 7
FergusArgyll 12/17/2025|
Yeah & chatgpt was trying to gaslight me - claiming it was my fault. Happy to put that bum in its place...
chistev 12/17/2025|
You use ChatGPT to know if a site is down?
laCour 12/17/2025||
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.
joncrane 12/17/2025||
Thank you. I was thinking myself or my corporate IP was shadowbanned
jonahx 12/17/2025|||
Is this a mistake by hund, or the configuration of hund by HN?
laCour 12/17/2025||
Mistake on our part (Hund) for not monitoring authentication. This page is unofficial and was made by a co-founder several years ago.
sammy2255 12/17/2025|||
You should add a graph of visitors per-minute for the status page for the past 24 hours or so. Would really help for situations like this
Cheer2171 12/17/2025||
[flagged]
dang 12/17/2025|||
Yikes, you can't do this here.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

sentrysapper 12/17/2025||||
What 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 12/17/2025|||
This just in: people make mistakes on occasion.
pcdoodle 12/17/2025||
[dead]
complianceowl 12/17/2025||
[flagged]
hmans 12/18/2025||
[dead]
gjsman-1000 12/17/2025||
[flagged]
Aachen 12/17/2025||
Keep 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

Eikon 12/17/2025||
> Keep in mind that votes aren't supposed to be about whether you agree or disagree

That’s not what happens in practice.

abujazar 12/17/2025|||
Unless 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.
null_deref 12/17/2025|||
Could 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 12/17/2025||
Your 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.
Jtsummers 12/17/2025|||
Complaining about downvotes usually gets you more downvotes, so the response here isn't really that surprising.
Jeremy1026 12/17/2025|||
You're probably being downvoted today for your "I was smarter than you" tone.
DonHopkins 12/17/2025||
It'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.
whatevermrfukz 12/17/2025||
[flagged]
whatevermrfukz 12/17/2025||
[flagged]
whatevermrfukz 12/17/2025|
[flagged]
DonHopkins 12/17/2025|
I remember my first beer.
null_deref 12/17/2025||
That Markov chain spiraled out of control
rolandog 12/17/2025||
Perhaps Grok was not trained to go so much time with 0 responses due to the downtime?