I have serious routing/peering issues all day long from germany (vodafone).

Dyndns is struggling also for me the entire day.

> "is there another explanation?"

It's aliens. They literally announced they have been reverse engineering space ships from aliens from outer space. I mean I don't think it's true but it's what they announced.

After I read your comment, I googled.

No one official announced anything. Instead an "insider" claims this. Among the claims, is that aliens are working with governements, and provided key tech, such as fiber optics, and silicon chips.

Yeah. OK.

I can literay, over a century, trace all the key scientific discoveries, how they happened, for transistors, ICs, etc. There was no help.

And shining light through glass isn't that fancy of a tech.

These articles piss me off. They belittle the capabilities of humans, for profit.

The parent is a troll and posted this thread "Is Hacker News slow for you guys too? I think it's the Apple announcements" just 20 minutes earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203460

I'm not a troll I think both reasons are true.

I really wish the aliens would hurry up and give us fusion power already, and maybe the cure to all diseases, a theory of everything and quantum computing while they're at it. I didn't need compact discs that badly.

This is where HN devolves into Reddit joke threads

It could be both? A wider outage at a high traffic time.

HN is timing out constantly for me. So are some Microsoft services. But then some other websites are loading fine...

HN timeouts only applied while logged in with me

Correct - logged out pages are cached and should serve much faster.

NB, someone was commenting a week ago that HN was observed as faster when logged in, not out:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36117794>

Like any typical developer, my response is "that shouldn't be happening".

If it is happening, that would be most interesting - but we'd need to test to be sure.

Yeah, that's my sense as well.

Speculation was that it might have been anti-bot countermeasures.

I've ... encountered those a few times recently doing my HN front-page research. Though not presenting as latency.

That would imply a slowness on the server and not with general internet peering

Correct.

no, something is going on across all the sites I visit

I haven't dug into the logs but I assume it's the Apple announcement.

Major perf improvements are coming (fingers crossed), but alas not yet. Sorry all!

Wait, you can make that thing even faster?

HN is painfully slow to me, partly because it chokes under load, and partly because nearly all software is painfully slow to me. It can definitely get a lot faster.