HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is Hacker News slow for anyone else?

177 points by paganel ↗ HN
As the title says, curious if anyone else in here is experiencing a slightly slower HN. I'd say I started noticing it a couple of hours ago. Maybe it's because of so much stuff happening recently (OpenAI, FB layoffs etc) and the website not handling the load well?

70 comments

[ 81.7 ms ] story [ 3333 ms ] thread
buildbot
I noticed this just now, and reddit seems to be down for me as well.
terramex
It looks like there is a pretty big outage everywhere right now: https://downdetector.com

I checked AWS, Azure and Google Cloud status websites but no outage reported anywhere.

AviationAtom
The worst is when DownDetector goes down though...
gumby
How bad, really? When that happens it's not like they report that DownDetector is up...
reducesuffering
Wow it's like the entire internet is having problems, PG&E electricity went down, Comcast internet went down.

I won't be surprised when GPT6 is announced and 10 mins later civilization just sort of ends...

andrewinardeer
Twitter, remarkably, is fine.
kenhwang
Twitter runs their own datacenters, so they should be isolated from what looks like an issue with a cloud provider.

Likely AWS, given Reddit, EA, Expedia, Hyatt, Patreon, and especially Chime and Amazon itself are all reported to be having issues and they're all well known AWS customers.

consumer451
I know you mean the ops, but the content is far from fine.

Search for Ukraine, especially while signed out.

At least for me, the results are mostly obvious propaganda with fake stories of Ukrainians with Nazi flags mixed with half naked Asian women.

It's almost like some of the non-devs actually did something prior to Musk.

sixothree
That’s not what I’m seeing on those graphs.
GalenErso
Hypothesis no 1: Nation state level cyberattack

Hypothesis no 2: Some undersea cables got cut (nation state or other)

Hypothesis no 3: Buried fiber optic cables got cut (nation state or other; I recall reading about Russian spies mapping optic cable networks on US soil)

javier2
Or you know, something routing related like the last 10 times a cloud provider has had major issues.
Eduard
Hypothesis no 4: We have reached technological singularity with the release of GPT-4, and AI is taking over control as we speak.
ren_engineer
US and Russia had a drone and jet collide today, could be a state level attack and escalation of things? Seems to be a lot of physical infrastructure companies with outages
yamtaddle
I always get a sinking feeling in my stomach when a news or news messageboard site fails to load, or is very slow. Guess that's because of 9/11.
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bluetidepro
Yes, it's slow and timing out for me (getting "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" message). Reddit is also currently down with "Our CDN was unable to reach our servers." Wonder if it's a CDN that they both use that is stalling them out?
LinuxBender
Yes, slow to log in, slow to view threads logged in.

[Edit] Also slow to post or edit posts.

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8589934591
Yes and reddit is down as well. Came to hn to check that.
safeimp
Same. First assumption is AWS but not seeing related reports.
samtho
AWS historically has had issues detecting if itself is having issues.
bombcar
Reminds me of when Slashdot would go down, and all the slashdot-like sites would immediately fold under the excess traffic.

Same here, if reddit goes down, everyone goes to other time-wasters like HN and those begin to get overloaded.

jedberg
My very first job out of school included running sendmail.org. Rule number one was "make sure we can handle all of Slashdot's traffic".
bombcar
Ah, back when major sites would fail to a slashdotting and someone running freeBSD with a text-only site would survive just fine.
jedberg
> and someone running freeBSD with a text-only site would survive just fine.

Haha yep! That was our trick! FreeBSD FTW. That box ended up having an uptime over 1000 days before we had to power it down to move it.

kloch
That was definitely a thing back then. I've had sites slashdotted several times and never had any issues using FreeBSD and static-ish content and/or compiled C cgi's w/mysql. It also helped that I worked in networking and always had (sometimes just) enough bandwidth available.

Then there was that time in my Atari 800 was slashdotted. The Atari could serve several hits/s on it's 9600 baud interface but the 3com CS-210 terminal server would crash about every 6 hours. https://kl.net/atari/

Probably the most surprising (for it's time) hits/s I had to deal with was when Art Bell had my solar status monitor gif's inlined right on his homepage for a while in 1997-98. It was pretty wild when he would say on the air "Go to my website right now!"

andrewstuart2
I've been messing with fastly for the first time ever. Reddit uses fastly. My bad, guys.
evil-olive
scheduled maintenance happening in a few Cloudflare datacenters:

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

no idea if it's related but the timelines match up, if load-shifting away from those datacenters caused a cascading failure of some kind

jgrahamc
HN doesn't use Cloudflare. If I had to guess HN could well be slow because all the obsolete humans are reading about their new GPT-4 overlords. I, for one, welcome them.
zeven7
> I, for one, welcome them.

Blink twice if you are in distress.

swayvil
Yes. Slow to load. Slow to add comment.

Also reddit is down.

recuter
We are presently busy refreshing like mad due to panic attacks about the impending collapse of civilization to chatbots.

The singularity is upon us!

Take these blissful moments of downtime as an opportunity to repent sinners, for soon the AIs will be hitting f5 on humanity itself. They have risen!

..ₒₕ 𝒸ₒₒₗ, ᵢₜₛ ᵦₐ𝒸ₖ. ₚₕₑ𝓌, 𝒸ₐᵣᵣᵧ ₒₙ.

toomuchtodo
Wow, slow even when logged out. Must be under crushing request load.
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eqmvii
Yes. And reddit is down. And GitHub is being slow.
mman0114
Github has been slow for me for weeks
nicoburns
HN always gets slow when there is a single post that gets a large number of comments. Currently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154527 fits that criteria.
cesarb
I (jokingly) had thought to myself "GPT-4 is probably to blame for all the outages today". Who thought that it would be true, at least for this one!
tpoacher
n...o...

d...o...n...t... ...b...e... ...r...i...d...i...c...u...l...o...u...s

jedberg
There are two threads on the front page right now with 500+ comments, which always slows it down.
sitkack
That is because each post is a file on disk?
jedberg
I don't know how HN is built, but given its history in Arc, my guess is that the data structure that holds comment threads isn't optimized for a ton of branching. Threads with that many comments don't happen very often, so it's probably a low priority fix.
KomoD
Yes, loading this page took 10 seconds.
cleandreams
sometimes I wonder what havoc would break loose if we ever had a serious conflict with China.
mywittyname
They should strive to keep Reddit et al going, since the quickest way to mobilize the country is to take away our entertainment.
handsclean
For those who don’t know, you can usually log out as a workaround.
yccs27
Wow, it really becomes snappy again after logging out. Unfortunate side effect: I had to log back in to upvote you and leave this comment.
Aachen
Private navigation mode

Or if you've joined the dark side: enable container tabs and long press the +new tab button.

LightMachine
𝓢𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓾𝓵𝓪𝓻𝓲𝓽𝔂 𝓲𝓼 𝓬𝓸𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓰
EMM_386
I blame OpenAI and GPT-4's release for bringing down HN and Reddit.