Why was HN down for the past 6 hours?
Not sure when it came up again, I probably last checked 2h ago. It was down from two vantage points in European countries. The site is now also extremely slow (ten seconds to load a page containing one comment). I'm surprised not to see an announcement, or a post on HNStatus.
What's up? Did/do others not experience this?
When it was down for me, I wound up at a cloudflare landing page. I checked, and sure enough, they seem to be behind cloudflare now:
news.ycombinator.com is an alias for news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.
Is that a new thing?
Today, yes it hanged whilst trying to load. And there's no Big News I can think of that would slow HN to a crawl (AKA cascade effect). I checked Twitter for 'hackernews down' and a few people reported outages, but not too many tweets like in some of the famous outages where HN was offline for 24 hours and Twitter was buzzing with people complaining.
I was getting cloudflare errors (IIRC 503 or 502) suggesting they are using a content cache that couldn't reach the hackernews backend.