
Ask PG: What caused the downtime? - aaronbrethorst
It looks like the site was down for a couple hours. What happened exactly?
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pg
Still investigating. The site was slow all day. We got an immense spike in
unique IPs. Typically we get a bit over 150k/day. Today we got 220k. Not sure
if the downtime was related.

I was travelling today and didn't have proper access to the server, or I would
have been on it sooner.

~~~
pg
Update: An examination of the logs shows nothing remarkable happening at the
moment of the crash.

We may have run out of some resource. In that case it may be hard to know for
sure what happened.

~~~
pg
Question: Did people find HN horribly slow this afternoon? (I found it
unusably slow around 2 pm pacific, but there was little I could do about it
from where I was then.)

~~~
knowtheory
The site had seemed slow basically all day for me, from say about 8:30-9am
central time (I'd been up and checking the site since 6) up to the point when
it crashed.

~~~
pg
Were you using https or http?

~~~
michaelcampbell
I was getting the proxy error message with https. I never tried http then.

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joshmlewis
It is very interesting how..eh..addictive this site is. It's like a habit to
do CMD + T and start typing in news.y..etc. And while it was down I was
refreshing every few minutes. I think personally I do get a lot out of this
site, I definitely wouldn't be where I am today without it. I've learned a
lot, asked a lot, and tried to give back as much as I could. I landed a couple
jobs from here that have now set me on a very successful path at such a young
age. I'm very thankful for the community here. Sorry for turning this into an
emotional post, but I really owe a lot to HN.

EDIT: I do just do CMD + T and then n for everyone who thought I did
otherwise. Sometimes it happens so quickly I do new..or whatever, but you get
the idea. This is a trivial point.

~~~
kposehn
> It's like a habit to do CMD + T and start typing in news.y

I think you're a real addict if you don't even get past typing ne before the
autocomplete comes up :D

~~~
pbrook
What website is more important/frequently visited and starts with n? I always
type n<enter> unless I was very recently browsing the new york times

~~~
pashamur
I tend to prefer <http://hckrnews.com> just because of the more intuitive
browsing interface and filtering options (top 10, top 20, etc). I have it as a
shortcut on my main phone screen and bookmarked in all browsers.

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ghshephard
I wonder if ycombinator could see a correlative increase in the value of their
portfolios through the simple process of shutting down news.yc for 3-4 hours a
day?

~~~
ajasmin
Maybe PG has a script that automatically enables noprocrast on all the YC
entrepreneur accounts.

~~~
debacle
I would hope not. While some of them are almost children (<20), there's no
need to treat them like children.

Software solutions to peopleware problems are always a bad idea.

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wildmXranat
Netflix chaos monkey is released into the wild, HN goes down soon after.
Coincidence, I think not!

~~~
mopoke
Great minds think alike :-)
<https://twitter.com/andykelk/status/230131954975133696>

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Xcelerate
Wow, I got a surprising amount of work done in the last few hours. I had to
check isup.me to make sure it was really down, else I would have found a proxy
server :)

~~~
Bill_Dimm
I hardly got anything done. I couldn't see the monitor through all of the
tears.

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josdewolk
Is anyone else out there proud to have a _healthy_ relationship with hacker
news?

~~~
mkopinsky
Yes. I only check it on nights, and never for more than eight hours, and never
until past 4am, except occasionally at work, but only when I don't have high
priority stuff to do, and ... crap.

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ck2
I would bet it was from some of the direct links on Reddit?

The Ubisoft backdoor was linked on reddit front page for awhile today.

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eranation
Yep, I have the same question, lot's of frustrated tweets
<https://twitter.com/#!/search/hackernews%20down>

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I haven't been this productive in MONTHS ;-)

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gojomo
The outage came shortly after pg retweeted
(<https://twitter.com/davidstamm/status/229926404333129728>):

 _@davidstamm: In the hour of your death, you will not warmly recall the many
hours you spent engaging in vitriolic debates on Hacker News._

So I just assumed the downtime was a social experiment. Maybe even a new
circuit-breaker: when global thread sentiments get a bit too snippy, the
entire site goes dark for a short period.

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MatCarpenter
I'm curious to see if it had something to do with hitting the front page of
Reddit. The Facebook Bot Clicks post received over 1,700 upvotes and perhaps
Reddit "performed the most friendly DDoS"

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emeraldd
I actually found that I didn't get as much done. I kept checking to see if the
site had come back up and wondering if there was a status page hiding
somewhere I didn't know about. Sheesh!

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ashleyblackmore
I was thinking someone must have unleashed the simian army:
<https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy>

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jnmata
I couldn't access the site for a few days (error 502) in Vancouver. Probably
unrelated?

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unimpressive
I think I might start throttling my bandwidth to 56kbs over HTTP/HTTPS.

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mikescar
Glad y'all got some work done, I just didn't do work elsewhere :).

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Kilimanjaro
God, it seemed like an eternity!

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aaronh
same question, noticed after i got sent two bogus password reset attempts...

