I found it horribly slow from about 18 hours ago (3pm GMT) onwards. I think the last time I tried it was about 9pm GMT, and it was slow them. It took about 30-60 seconds to load a page, maybe more.

Edit: this was using https, I didn't try http.

I was using my phone browser when the site was down. What I noticed was that the "secure" icon was displayed when I tried to connect. However, this may have been an artifact in the address bar from the previous site which was secure - I haven't paid that much attention to how the phone's browser handles slow loads.

The reason it caught my attention was due to the recent https "Ask" threads, and my first thought was perhaps full time https had been implemented. I wouldn't bring it up except that it was unusual and correlated with HN content and the outage, even though it is likely to be a coincidence.

The site had seemed slow basically all day for me, from say about 8:30-9am central time (I'd been up and checking the site since 6) up to the point when it crashed.

Were you using https or http?

I was getting the proxy error message with https. I never tried http then.

I've been using HTTPS consistently.

Yes: unusably slow both times I tried yesterday.