Tell HN: HN was down
163 comments
·December 17, 2025dang
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 - 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.
shlomo_z
Crazy that Dang literally manages HN in his sleep!
We all knew that but I haven't seen any confirmation before this.
Rooster61
No apology needed. We all needed to stop procrastinating anyways :)
echelon
I didn't realize you were carrying the pager too! Kudos!
Elfener
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
HPsquared
Sometimes I'll catch myself absentmindedly reopening the browser and checking two or three front pages, seconds after having just checked them and closed the browser.
neom
Yeah me too. Wake up -> HN down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> loop.
That was a few hours ago. I'm glad this loop is broken.
squeefers
sounds very much like an evil social media dopamine feedback loop. ironic given everyone on HN is so anti social media.... its clearly only bad for kids though i should add, silly of me to exclude such a detail
bee_rider
HN is obviously social media and it is silly to say otherwise. It is just social media that occasionally has interesting stuff. The SNR is just slightly higher.
neom
I've been on this internet hit shit since the 90s lil bro, s' all good.
manbitesdog
TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex
directmusic
I'm glad I'm not the only one. If I type 'n' into any browser it autocompletes to HN.
ectospheno
I learn more reading the comments here than anywhere else. Thanks everyone for my addiction.
1shooner
If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down.
squeefers
so youve got the willpower to do something about it but not enough to just stop doing it?
1shooner
Yes.
dwedge
Have you never suffered from habitual reflexes? I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in
jstummbillig
I say. Vibe coded 4 apps once I got past that, on my way to half a billion in ARR already.
thesurlydev
Same! Right there with "every day must begin with coffee"
lysace
⌘-T, N, <RET>
Did it like 5 times during that 1h-ish outage. :(
wincy
I’ve turned on no procrast mode and set it to ten minutes per hour. Helped me a lot!
HanClinto
What are you using to control this?
randallsquared
It's a setting available on the page you get from clicking on your own username.
bee_rider
It is on your profile, the “noprocrast” dropdown.
AndrewKemendo
It just reinforces for me that addiction is a human problem not a problem with technology
I know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patterns
but yet here we all are
chistev
It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities.
It's understandable to be addicted. Lol.
I visit this place multiple times a day.
steve_adams_86
> the smartest people in the world
But also, people like me. Be careful what you choose to believe on this website
andrepd
Poe's Law for a parody of the self-important sv techbro
phantasmish
99% of social science or political topics and 50% of technical topics here do not… read as smart, and you’d be much better off spending the same time reading the first chapter of a relevant 101-level college textbook.
fwip
It's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.
linhns
Also the level of flak is unrivaled.
null
the_af
> It's a website with the smartest people in the world.
Nice joke!
At least, I hope it was a joke...
PurpleRamen
But, would the addiction become worse if HN changed, or would there be a point where they could cure it?
dzink
This one is at least healthy-ish for the mind. I’d much rather hacker news than any other news. Social Media is an emotional rage-bait cesspool these days. If it’s not for Hacker News those of us who abstain from the rest would be living in the dark.
al_borland
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.
Is there a better place to check, beyond a basic down detector that may provide more insight or signal that the outage is acknowledged?
FuriouslyAdrift
Only way I have figured out how to to change the "Following" sort order back to chronological is from the mobile app: click the down arrow on the "Following" tab. Change the sort from "popular" to "most recent."
Seems to reset it on the web view, too.
al_borland
It sounds like this would only work for logged in users.
zipy124
https://hn.hund.io/ Is a status page, no idea if official or not, but it didn't register here for some reason.
I didn't read the post text, it's identified there haha, my bad! I wish the text post text wasn't grey, I gloss over it too easily.
laCour
This was monitoring the unauthenticated news page, which is why it didn't catch it. It now monitors authentication as well. It is not official, and was made by a co-founder years ago.
eddyg
Thanks! I checked that page and wondered why it stayed green. I resorted to checking https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news
lagniappe
This site said HN was fine and green the entire time it was down.
sosodev
Yes, and I'm a little ashamed to admit my morning routine wasn't the same without it.
laCour
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
Thank you. I was thinking myself or my corporate IP was shadowbanned
liampulles
Smart. Have to use that error budget before year end...
dylan604
I always hated the late use-it-or-loose-it at the end of the year where you end up buying the things that were denied requests from earlier in the year. You just cost me half a year of using the damn thing.
steve_adams_86
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)
xxs
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.
scottydelta
Now it makes sense. I was puzzled about why it was working on the phone browser and not on my system. I'm logged into HN on my system.
wavemode
When it was down my thought was "damnit, I'll actually have a productive workday now."
tzs
Next time you can avoid that fate by opening HN in a private browsing (or whatever your browser calls its equivalent) window. This outage, like the vast majority of HN outages, only affected logged in requests.
I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.
dpoloncsak
Huh. Dunno why, but when it failed on Firefox I tried Chrome, and it worked. I wrote it off as a Mozilla issue, but this would better explain that I think
neom
Is it my imagination or did they used to automatically serve you a logged out page when it was down?
dwa3592
hahaha
ortusdux
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
rozenmd
Interestingly it stayed up if you weren't logged in.
jedberg
If you aren't logged in you get a cached version from the CDN/cache. Reddit works the same way.
Izkata
Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).
cess11
That's how I concluded that it wasn't a ban on my account but rather more serious.
bryanrasmussen
also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well.
on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.
smallerize
That only worked for a while, eventually I couldn't load comment pages even logged out.
davnicwil
that'll be because it's served from cache when you're not logged in
- 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.