It was not offline. It was pretty slow - some requests failed entirely - but only for authenticated users which suggests the problem was server/database capacity as the unauthenticated pages served from cache were still very fast.

> ... the unauthenticated pages served from cache were still very fast.

Wouldn't those have been coming from Cloudflare, though?

Hacker News has not used Cloudflare for some time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18496344

Hacker News worked fine for me during the Facebook outage.

Didn’t work for me. The reason I figured out about FB being down was searching for HN being down.

I learned on HN that Facebook etc. were down (at that very moment).

Worked for me too.

Maybe though, GP is meta, about how psyops efforts moved elsewhere.

Probably too silly but I found the thought fun. Hope you've enjoyed it too.

I could browse fine, but the one time during the outage that I attempted to post a comment it timed out.

Hacker News worked flawlessly for me. Maybe your network had an issue/

I definitely saw some error pages with the orange bar.

IT'S NOT THE NETWORK!

Sincerely,

A Network Engineer

It does not. But a lot of people flocked to HN to see what is going on or because they did not have their other alternative.

I don’t buy this. My impression was that the slowness was sustained during the entire outage and then instantly let up once Facebook came back online.

I’m really curious why this was the case.

HN tends to slow down when there are very active discussion threads. The FB is down threads died down quite a bit when their site came back online. The threads for FB is back online had much sparser discussion.

There's not a whole lot of mystery here.

Those threads weren't particularly active. They aren't even the most active threads in the last month: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

That said, I can't claim that those threads didn't have more readers than other threads. But I can't say they they did either.

It also seems uniquely interesting that some people experienced the slowness but others did not.

If you loaded in private browsing (or logged out), HN was speedy as normal. If you're like me, from time to time you accidentally sign out and don't notice it until much later.

BGP side effect, like maybe FB DNS normally is answering (for some geographies) DNS queries reaching out to news.ycombinator.com ?

At the time, people were saying the slowdown went away if you logged out. I wanted to comment on things, so I didn't try it.

Trackers?