Is HN having issues?

Someone asked the other day "How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34001410) so obviously someone is now trying to figure out how to work around it, and it seems they succeeded!

Or, it's just busy :) I think the software in general have problems with long/deeply nested comment chains so maybe having a few of those being popular is enough to bring things to a halt.

By the way, you can usually work around performance issues on HN by either logging out (removing cookies if it doesn't load) or using incognito mode/private window (being logged out) as then the software can just serve cache views instead of having to fetch data on each navigation.

Edit: from the almighty dang:

> I've moved that one off the front page, partly because these are more or less the same story, but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all!

From "Twitter Suspends PG's Account" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044525

Seems Elon Musk/Twitter is the one to blame for HN being slow right now.

Yeah, maybe an unintentional DDOS from Twittee/Elon

Yes, sorry. Unusual traffic, especially for a Sunday.

Yeah, dang has just posted the following at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044475

"[...] but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all!"

Slow for me. I’m guessing traffic spike from the Twitter drama.

A tip (which I learned from @dang years ago). Browse in "private mode", which is much easier on the server than browsing while you're logged in.

The server IIRC does a decent amount of work per page determining your user-id and various behaviors of the text. But if you're a default, anonymous, "private" browser, the webpage is always more responsive.

Not necessarily "as responsive as it should be" mind you, but it does seem to help.

For me it takes almost 10 seconds to load from Sweden/Stockholm. So it may indeed be some sort of service issue.

I’ve been having that issue for years. Occasionally it will do that and after a while go back to normal. I’m actually sunrises to see so many people mention it lately.

Yes it is barely accessibly from a location in Europe. Httping gives me 1-2 seconds. Other sites hosted in the US are fine (for me).

I was getting comment-banned after 5 in one hour (5-10 in 24 hours) Which lasted for 2 hours, and then happened again another day.

Can confirm, had to reload new page twice to look for this exact thread.

Browse the site logged out

Yes