HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why post about site outages?

18 points by emocin ↗ HN
It seems like almost every day a prominent site goes down, and people race each other to post to HN with a one line subject of "reddit down" or "facebook down" and nothing else.

I am just wondering what the purpose of being the first person to post "Facebook down" with a link to facebook is. Are we expected to get some sort of value out of knowing FB is down, or is it just schadenfreude?

Genuinely curious!

19 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 54.8 ms ] thread
uuoc
I suspect it is schadenfreude.

For what it is worth, I ALWAYS flag every "X is down" post I see appear in the new list. If there were more flagging of them, the posters would get the message and quit posting them.

caio1982
Personally I'd rather flag such posts because HN is a place for news and meaningful discussions around those and IMHO there are better sites/services to monitor if whatever is up or down. Now, I'd really like to see a discussion with links to some post-mortems or analysis about the outage. That would be super interesting, but not just the service URL with a catchy title, please.
kelseydh
I don't agree with flagging such posts. As developers we can be on the losing end of these problems within our own products, and this site can be a useful hub for receiving information on how to technically handle these incidents.

E.g. after a major DNS outage caused many people with Heroku websites to go down, developers on Hacker News were able to quickly share advice on how to get around it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842302

caio1982
I respectfully agree to disagree but thanks for the example about Heroku. That's a very fair point.
publicfig
Many developers run business dependent on platforms. It's nice to have a place for discussion to see if it's a localized instance or a widespread issue.
caio1982
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/facebook.com

http://is-it-down.com/facebook.com

Et al :-)

po1nter
Even better: https://developers.facebook.com/status/
publicfig
Have you tried going to that link? It's down as well.

edit: Seems to be jumping between in and out. It's a bad sign when your status page is tied to your actual site unless this is for traffic related reasons.

publicfig
I understand and agree that those are great options, but it's also nice to be able to discuss a downtime, especially if it's a particularly long one, at least for me. Plus, with how many articles I'm not interested in that would make it to the front page, just having one that's removed when a major service is back online doesn't seem too inhibiting to me.
kelseydh
I go to Hacker News during major downtimes because it's the most likely place I can visit to find a real technical explanation for why a site is encountering problems. This site is so closely connected to Silicon Valley, it's not uncommon for "inside story" information to get posted here that's not posted in the media.

Discussing downtime events also holds practical value. If we are affected by the outage, having a news entry about downtime on hacker news allows us to share to one another useful information regarding how to respond to it.

emocin
That's a good point, I hadn't thought of that.
phantom_oracle
I'm guessing link karma?

Contrary to what some might feel/think, having higher karma means something on HN.

Apparently it means so much that users with massive karma gain some type of influencer status with things they post, thereby cementing their place/s as "top" contributors in perpetuity (which isn't a bad thing, considering how much traffic it may drive, if you need to market something).

I suppose this is why some folks who left HN, did so because it was an echo chamber for the "top" karma people and those trying to get there.

This is just a theory though, so take it with a pinch of salt. The true intentions of posting those pointless site-outage links could be less nefarious.

emocin
Yeah but if the post is devoid of details, why would anyone upvote it?
thrusong
Sorry for posting one today- it was my first. I only did it because I'm a big Facebook fan and always enjoy talking about the downtime. They don't really give postmortems anymore, so this is the place I come to to talk about it.
emocin
That's fair, like I said I was simply curious. It didn't seem to make a ton of sense to me, but it sorta does now :)
dang
Those posts are pretty well all off-topic. Hearing that a site is down doesn't gratify intellectual curiosity [1]. Hearing why it went down is different, of course, but that kind of article takes longer to appear.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kelseydh
Usually you can find the reason for why a site is down by reading Hacker News comments, not the article. That's why downtime posts on Hacker News are useful.

I come to Hacker News to read comments about the issue when major internet news breaks, because it's likely that somebody with a technical background intimately aware of what's going on will post here. With one good self post to discuss the issue, there's a hub for discussion and often interesting technical information about the issue that gets shared that the general media won't cover.

E.g. when Cloudflare recently had major downtime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842302 People on Hacker News posted explanations of what was going on and how to get around the issue almost right away, beating Cloudflare's own customer support blog by 3-4 hours easily. I remember it well because I had hundreds of customers contacting me immediately during that downtime incident. The information I got on Hacker News was crucial for helping me respond effectively & quickly during that crisis.

dang
That's a good point.