Why did HN just go down?

The gateway must have went bad and then got good again

Happens almost every day for me, but I basically live on this site. It will usually only last 10-15 seconds, some as long as 2 minutes.

The musk fan base (and detractors) are going wild trying to discuss his actions about twtr and probably overloaded hn.

I noticed that as well, and also saw a similar "blackout" a few days ago that lasted longer. First time ever in years... so wondering if something has changed / is changing on their side.

Usually the megathreads cause it.

Every week or so, HN will give me that error, but it's almost always back in a few minutes. I don't really think that much about it, sometimes we all have bad days.

My theory: The admins were trimming a whole bunch of submissions about Musk's takeover that all appeared at once, to try to force everything into one mega-thread submission. Everyone saw the news/tweet and rushed to HN to be the one who picks up all those precious HN karma points!

In any event, don't worry about it! There are other sites on the internet.

I saw this for the first time last week and have since gotten this several times. Often opening the site in Incognito mode "fixes" it, but I would not expect a Bad Gateway error to returned in case of any user-specific throttling or anything so I put it down to a coincidence.

Same for me! It is now working but seems a bit degraded in terms of response time.

Chances are there's not enough load balancers to handle sudden traffic spike, probably.

Didn’t you hear? Musk has launched an hostile takeover of hacker news too! /s

Happens multiple times a day I've noticed.

I imagine it was crushed by the Mush traffic.

You're all correct.