I always wondered. How did we manage to run anything lets say 20 years ago. We should have multiple times more memory, cpu, bandwidth available... Or are we just that many magnitudes more inefficient?

Yes, it is magnitudes more inefficient, with large JS payloads, slow APIs, and underpowered cloud hosts.

Websites often went down under load 20 years ago too but people were far more quick to think it was their own connection on the blink.

Yes, sites were much better engineered too, with smaller and less rich and less dynamic payloads, but don't count out a change in expectations along with it.

How much traffic could that be? Given the number of comments on this page, I can't imagine it being more than a few thousand clicks? So why would any site go down?

According to Cloudflare, the site has had around 30k unique visitors in just the first 3 hours since the link was posted here.

It's my site, yes. It's on a VPS which usually has far more resources than required. I really wasn't expecting to get everyone's attention.

That's much more than I expected, to be honest. I guess most people are lurking.