
Ask HN: Why did both “fastmail is down” posts get flagged? - comboy
HN is always full of positive opinions about Fastmail. Why would posts about its downtime, which seem relevant to many HN users, get flagged? Downtime seemed to have shown some important aspects about their infrastructure (which I mentioned in my comment on one of these posts)
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greenyoda
Because they're off-topic. HN Guidelines say:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."[1]

Why is a brief interruption in Fastmail or Twitter or Netflix interesting?
These things happen all the time. As a Fastmail user, I noticed that Fastmail
was down, and then I looked at their status page to confirm they were really
down and the problem wasn't on my end. Then I waited five minutes, and they
came back up. Seeing a post about it on HN doesn't help me at all. And someone
who is not a Fastmail user wouldn't care in the least.

They said they lost network connectivity to a couple of racks. What
interesting things can we learn about their infrastructure from this? Their
back-end IMAP server got disconnected and their web servers stayed up. It's a
completely generic problem that can happen in any datacenter.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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detaro
Agreed. If there is something interesting to learn, they'll hopefully write
about it later. _That 's_ then something we can have a meaningful discussion
about.

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FatalLogic
Maybe when they flagged it fastmail.com didn't appear to be down. A title like
"Fastmail had an outage" might work better.

Fastmail says it's up again now, but sluggish

[https://twitter.com/FastMail](https://twitter.com/FastMail)

[https://www.fastmailstatus.com](https://www.fastmailstatus.com)

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alphabettsy
There seem to be lots of emotional flaggers, that's about all I've gathered.
Maybe someone could elaborate further.

I personally am seeing a delay in receiving(1-3 mins), but not sending mail,
both via IMAP. I have not checked webmail. Assuming this is a blip, FM
certinaly will still continue to be my choice since this would be the first
outage I've noticed and I love most everything about the service.

Status page shows degraded still:
[https://www.fastmailstatus.com](https://www.fastmailstatus.com)

