It's daily now, that I'm seeing "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!", maybe even 10-20 times during different times.
From Europe, especially during the lunch break hours, HN is down again and again. For instance as of the past 30 minutes, I see the above message more often than the expected pages. It's been like that also yesterday, the day before that.
I understand that this happens often based on searching, but I don't remember having it that often in the past.
Honest question: what happens, why do we get that message, especially during these times? Is there something that is going on the the early AM hours in the US? Maintenance work maybe?
Edit based on some comments below:
- could it be this has to do with being logged in or not? I will try to stay less often logged in.
- dang wrote: "but for those who are comfortable logging in and out: HN gets a lot faster if you log out, and it will reduce the load on the server if you do" (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611)
- another reason could be rate limits, especially if not logged in
- rozenmd is monitoring HN, that looks awesome: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/
- "Did you post something negative about Google/DEI? Or maybe just upvote it? Or skim one of those threads. There you go. Time out for you." <---- this is particularly disturbing IF TRUE
https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/
here's what it looks like on the monitoring side:
https://x.com/RozenMD/status/1763152885892727188?s=20
(HN is slightly more stable if you're logged out)
Dead Comment
The rate limiter is even stricter when not logged in — for a period I wanted to take a break with getting into online arguments, so I stayed logged out, which would cause my IP to be banned after a day or two (a bit annoying, though easily unbanned with the self-service system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102) — IIRC dang confirmed that it would be better to stay logged in to avoid this anti-bot measure.
I guess that's the price to pay to have such a popular website that's maintained by a single person.
Why do you think, it is only one? There is definitely help with the moderation for example.
It's kind of expected behavior when there's a thread with thousands of comments (like when OpenAI shafts their CEO [0]), but the last few days seemed relatively calm.
So maybe the server is crumbling under the increase in traffic from higher HN rankings in Google [1]?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310213
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949
But it's a great free service with no tracking/ads so I'm fine with that.
The posts for YC backed companies that are hiring (where the comments are turned off) are ads.
If you put it that way, the whole site is a giant ad for Y Combinator. It just happens to be a public service too.
It's also one of the few sites* i frequent where uBlock Origin says it's not blocking anything.
* Tbh the only other is Ars Technica, and there only because I'm logged in as a paying customer.
I'm almost always logged in, and it happens even when I have not visited HN in some hours.
There was this recently:
A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankingshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949
Deleted Comment
Which is interesting because YC has funded many infra companies.
I usually browse through hn.algolia.com and that has a much higher uptime than news.ycombinator.com
In 2024, it is surprising how often HN is unavailable.