Yes, sorry! We're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago.
(The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.)
In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.
I'll add more as we find out more, but it probably won't be till later this afternoon PST.
We all have our moments, and I personally consider HN to be “best effort”, almost like a volunteer project. I’m not certain I’m correct: but thats the optics I have so my expectations are adjusted to that.
So don’t beat yourself up please.
When I worked for “SaaS unicorn” we typically had multiple levels of escalation, and acknowledging would have done nothing because the alarm would continue firing until fixed. Not sure what’s changed in 15 years of ops, I had assumed it would be better now- I can’t imagine silencing an alert totally by acknowledging it- if its still occurring.
I’m totally fine with how you handled it, if anything I am thankful. But that seems to be a system I would improve if I had the time.
“mute” is different than “resolve” to me, and both should exist. (Where mute is an acknowledgement of an issue as ongoing.)
Sometimes I'll catch myself absentmindedly reopening the browser and checking two or three front pages, seconds after having just checked them and closed the browser.
Yeah me too. Wake up -> HN down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> loop.
That was a few hours ago. I'm glad this loop is broken.
sounds very much like an evil social media dopamine feedback loop. ironic given everyone on HN is so anti social media.... its clearly only bad for kids though i should add, silly of me to exclude such a detail
HN is obviously social media and it is silly to say otherwise. It is just social media that occasionally has interesting stuff. The SNR is just slightly higher.
I Still found it funny that we have downdetector, downdetectordowndetector, downdetectordowndetectordowndetector,... (I lost count) but downdetector doesn't detect HN's status.
If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down.
Have you never suffered from habitual reflexes? I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in
We all admire your absolute mastery of your own habitual reflexes and mind. For the rest of us, there is a daily battle of wits, desires, weakness, and habit.
If I could snap my fingers and break toxic habits and patterns, I would have done so decades ago :)
Whoa. A website that cares about its users enough to _easily support limiting access to itself_?
That's so refreshing in terms of being a user-focused feature, and yet it stands in sharp contrast against today's engagement-hyperfocused climate. I never would have thought to look on a website's own settings page to limit my access to that same website.
99% of social science or political topics and 50% of technical topics here do not… read as smart, and you’d be much better off spending the same time reading the first chapter of a relevant 101-level college textbook.
It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet,
i cant find the link, but there was a post about how to "be nice" and it was a revelation to a worrying amount of "geniuses" on here. bare in mind the sum total of the advice was "be nice, dont be rude"
It's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.
This one is at least healthy-ish for the mind. I’d much rather hacker news than any other news. Social Media is an emotional rage-bait cesspool these days. If it’s not for Hacker News those of us who abstain from the rest would be living in the dark.
Is this still a valid account for HN status? It says it’s the official one, but with the changes at Twitter to no longer show chronological feeds (at least for users that aren’t logged in), it’s rather useless. The top 5 listed post (for me) are seemingly random from 2014 - 2022.
Only way I have figured out how to to change the "Following" sort order back to chronological is from the mobile app: click the down arrow on the "Following" tab. Change the sort from "popular" to "most recent."
This was monitoring the unauthenticated news page, which is why it didn't catch it. It now monitors authentication as well. It is not official, and was made by a co-founder years ago.
I'm with Hund. Our hn.hund.io page did not catch this because it was requesting the cached, unauthenticated page. It now monitors authentication as well.
And with this, you should shut down hn.hund.io because you just did massive damage to your brand's value. If it is unofficial, if you can't do it right, don't do it at all. You had one job, the thing your company exists to do, and you blew it. Nothing makes me rage more than a lying dashboard, and yours lied for 3+ hours.
I always hated the late use-it-or-loose-it at the end of the year where you end up buying the things that were denied requests from earlier in the year. You just cost me half a year of using the damn thing.
Next time you can avoid that fate by opening HN in a private browsing (or whatever your browser calls its equivalent) window. This outage, like the vast majority of HN outages, only affected logged in requests.
I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.
Huh. Dunno why, but when it failed on Firefox I tried Chrome, and it worked. I wrote it off as a Mozilla issue, but this would better explain that I think
A lot of them got fooled by the caching; pages for signed-out users are cached heavily and those kept returning successful responses even if the actual backend server was down.
Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).
also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well.
on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.
It's down about 8.4 minutes per week. On 26% of days it doesn't work at least once, and on 12% of days it has more than one consecutive failed check. The longest uptime streak was 24 days
I've been keeping track since exactly 2 years (to the day!) because I was surprised that it seemed briefly down for me on a daily basis. Was I getting unlucky and hitting it every time, or was it just down very often? Nobody posted anything so I started answering the question for myself :p
I've been meaning to post the tracker to HN but there's a pesky bug I want to fix: the "is it currently down" stat. I don't know how this is beyond me but something in the code bugs out. So this is my first time posting about it
You can just look at them, turn on showdead in your profile and you'll see a bunch of flag-killed comments in this discussion by whatevermrfukz. No need for a plugin or scraper.
I thought I was being rate-limited for opening posts too fast, which has happened before.
After more than an hour I thought, "wow this is pretty harsh" and "so much of my exposure to learning things is directly tied to HN posts". I was lost lol.
Just a month ago, I got downvoted to -2 for saying HN for being self-hosted hasn't shown up as more reliable than something behind Cloudflare. My point is made.
Edit: Now it happens again. Knee jerk defenses all the way down.
Keep in mind that votes aren't supposed to be about whether you agree or disagree, but whether a comment adds substance to the thread. A good question that makes a wrong assumption can be worth upvoting; a correct but fairly irrelevant statement about politics not (to give a relatively obvious example)
Being "voted to -2" doesn't necessarily mean you were wrong (it often correlates though). People might just think it wasn't relevant in whatever context you posted it in
I often find it hard to tell what makes people think something I write is not helpful (or sometimes also a comment someone else made) and thus appreciate comments that clarify constructively. It can also help to ask for clarification if you're particularly surprised about the votes on a given post
Unless the downtime was caused by something Cloudflare would've prevented, this downtime would've happened regardless of being behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare adds another single point of failure.
Could this be a self-inflicted bug? In that case, the broader point still stands: cloud providers can cause outages that are outside your direct realm of responsibility.
Your VPS server and your data center and the ISP your data center uses and the AS system your ISP uses all can cause outages outside your direct realm of responsibility.
It's absolutely irresistible downvoting people who preemptively complain about being downvoted like you do. It really made my day. Post another complaint so I can do it again please! It's not knee jerk when you explicitly ask for it, by leading with a complaint about downvoting, instead of just making your point and letting it fall or rise on its own merits. You're the one who put the idea of downvoting you into my head in the first place.
Yes, sorry! We're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago.
(The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.)
In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.
I'll add more as we find out more, but it probably won't be till later this afternoon PST.
Crazy that Dang literally manages HN in his sleep!
We all knew that but I haven't seen any confirmation before this.
fails to manage HN in my sleep is more like it
Do you have nightmares of failing to manage HN when you sleep too?
We all have our moments, and I personally consider HN to be “best effort”, almost like a volunteer project. I’m not certain I’m correct: but thats the optics I have so my expectations are adjusted to that.
So don’t beat yourself up please.
When I worked for “SaaS unicorn” we typically had multiple levels of escalation, and acknowledging would have done nothing because the alarm would continue firing until fixed. Not sure what’s changed in 15 years of ops, I had assumed it would be better now- I can’t imagine silencing an alert totally by acknowledging it- if its still occurring.
I’m totally fine with how you handled it, if anything I am thankful. But that seems to be a system I would improve if I had the time.
“mute” is different than “resolve” to me, and both should exist. (Where mute is an acknowledgement of an issue as ongoing.)
No apology needed. We all needed to stop procrastinating anyways :)
I didn't realize you were carrying the pager too! Kudos!
[delayed]
Looking forward to the post mortem. :)
dang
I got stuck in an infinite loop.
Try opening HN -> it's down, better check HN to see everyone talking about a major website being down -> Try opening HN -> loop
Sometimes I'll catch myself absentmindedly reopening the browser and checking two or three front pages, seconds after having just checked them and closed the browser.
Yeah me too. Wake up -> HN down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> That's weird, oh well it's usually only down for a few minutes -> I should check if HN is still down -> loop.
That was a few hours ago. I'm glad this loop is broken.
sounds very much like an evil social media dopamine feedback loop. ironic given everyone on HN is so anti social media.... its clearly only bad for kids though i should add, silly of me to exclude such a detail
HN is obviously social media and it is silly to say otherwise. It is just social media that occasionally has interesting stuff. The SNR is just slightly higher.
I've been on this internet hit shit since the 90s lil bro, s' all good.
I can stop any time I want, I just don't want!
I woke up and was wondering if I’ve just woken up in hell!
I Still found it funny that we have downdetector, downdetectordowndetector, downdetectordowndetectordowndetector,... (I lost count) but downdetector doesn't detect HN's status.
TIL I have a "open Hacker News" hand reflex
I'm glad I'm not the only one. If I type 'n' into any browser it autocompletes to HN.
Save typing hundreds of letters per day, and replace about:newtab with news.ycombinator.com, now you can just do CTRL+T :)
I learn more reading the comments here than anywhere else. Thanks everyone for my addiction.
I say. Vibe coded 4 apps once I got past that, on my way to half a billion in ARR already.
If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down.
https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/
You'll still open new tabs and go to HN, but you'll be reminded quickly, and every day can be downtime day \o/ (for you, personally)
so youve got the willpower to do something about it but not enough to just stop doing it?
Yes.
Have you never suffered from habitual reflexes? I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in
I deleted the YouTube mobile app a few months ago and I still reflexively reach for the app icon every now and then. Thanks YouTube Shorts.
> I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in?
youd go through that effort when you could have just stopped though.
We all admire your absolute mastery of your own habitual reflexes and mind. For the rest of us, there is a daily battle of wits, desires, weakness, and habit.
If I could snap my fingers and break toxic habits and patterns, I would have done so decades ago :)
Same! Right there with "every day must begin with coffee"
I’ve turned on no procrast mode and set it to ten minutes per hour. Helped me a lot!
What are you using to control this?
It is on your profile, the “noprocrast” dropdown.
It's a setting available on the page you get from clicking on your own username.
Whoa. A website that cares about its users enough to _easily support limiting access to itself_?
That's so refreshing in terms of being a user-focused feature, and yet it stands in sharp contrast against today's engagement-hyperfocused climate. I never would have thought to look on a website's own settings page to limit my access to that same website.
I love it, thank you for pointing me to this!
⌘-T, N, <RET>
Did it like 5 times during that 1h-ish outage. :(
It just reinforces for me that addiction is a human problem not a problem with technology
I know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patterns
but yet here we all are
It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities.
It's understandable to be addicted. Lol.
I visit this place multiple times a day.
> the smartest people in the world
But also, people like me. Be careful what you choose to believe on this website
99% of social science or political topics and 50% of technical topics here do not… read as smart, and you’d be much better off spending the same time reading the first chapter of a relevant 101-level college textbook.
It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet,
i cant find the link, but there was a post about how to "be nice" and it was a revelation to a worrying amount of "geniuses" on here. bare in mind the sum total of the advice was "be nice, dont be rude"
Intelligence has many dimensions.
It's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.
> It's really not 'the smartest people.'
This was especially obvious during Covid, I even stopped visiting because the comment section was so crazy.
Also the level of flak is unrivaled.
> It's a website with the smartest people in the world.
Nice joke!
At least, I hope it was a joke...
Poe's Law for a parody of the self-important sv techbro
But, would the addiction become worse if HN changed, or would there be a point where they could cure it?
This one is at least healthy-ish for the mind. I’d much rather hacker news than any other news. Social Media is an emotional rage-bait cesspool these days. If it’s not for Hacker News those of us who abstain from the rest would be living in the dark.
So do I, but it was such a shock that I just passed out, and when I woke up, it was back up.
I already knew that. :)
I did not know how addicted I was to HN until today lol
obligatory: https://xkcd.com/477/
Yes, and I'm a little ashamed to admit my morning routine wasn't the same without it.
This was more impactful to my day than the last AWS and CloudFlare outages...
At least during those outages I could procrastinate on HN.
I felt like changing HN down page to show top 30 posts from this week before or after the generic message.
Is this still a valid account for HN status? It says it’s the official one, but with the changes at Twitter to no longer show chronological feeds (at least for users that aren’t logged in), it’s rather useless. The top 5 listed post (for me) are seemingly random from 2014 - 2022.
https://x.com/HNStatus
Is there a better place to check, beyond a basic down detector that may provide more insight or signal that the outage is acknowledged?
Only way I have figured out how to to change the "Following" sort order back to chronological is from the mobile app: click the down arrow on the "Following" tab. Change the sort from "popular" to "most recent."
Seems to reset it on the web view, too.
It sounds like this would only work for logged in users.
https://hn.hund.io/ Is a status page, no idea if official or not, but it didn't register here for some reason.
I didn't read the post text, it's identified there haha, my bad! I wish the text post text wasn't grey, I gloss over it too easily.
This was monitoring the unauthenticated news page, which is why it didn't catch it. It now monitors authentication as well. It is not official, and was made by a co-founder years ago.
Thanks! I checked that page and wondered why it stayed green. I resorted to checking https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news
This site said HN was fine and green the entire time it was down.
I'm with Hund. Our hn.hund.io page did not catch this because it was requesting the cached, unauthenticated page. It now monitors authentication as well.
Thank you. I was thinking myself or my corporate IP was shadowbanned
Is this a mistake by hund, or the configuration of hund by HN?
Mistake on our part (Hund) for not monitoring authentication. This page is unofficial and was made by a co-founder several years ago.
And with this, you should shut down hn.hund.io because you just did massive damage to your brand's value. If it is unofficial, if you can't do it right, don't do it at all. You had one job, the thing your company exists to do, and you blew it. Nothing makes me rage more than a lying dashboard, and yours lied for 3+ hours.
Smart. Have to use that error budget before year end...
I always hated the late use-it-or-loose-it at the end of the year where you end up buying the things that were denied requests from earlier in the year. You just cost me half a year of using the damn thing.
Man if I had a coin every time I email the mods and this thing goes down, I'd strangely have two coins.
I was fortunate enough to get to watch a bunch of kids racing and bouncing in bouncy castles in our school gym during HN's downtime.
It's not that much different from HN, come to think of it.
(ha, ha)
When it was down my thought was "damnit, I'll actually have a productive workday now."
Next time you can avoid that fate by opening HN in a private browsing (or whatever your browser calls its equivalent) window. This outage, like the vast majority of HN outages, only affected logged in requests.
I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.
Huh. Dunno why, but when it failed on Firefox I tried Chrome, and it worked. I wrote it off as a Mozilla issue, but this would better explain that I think
Is it my imagination or did they used to automatically serve you a logged out page when it was down?
hahaha
PSA - if you delete your cookies, HN gets it easier. Or just test it in a private window.
It did work without being logged on. The auth service appeared to be down as the log in attempt (just showing the page) failed.
Now it makes sense. I was puzzled about why it was working on the phone browser and not on my system. I'm logged into HN on my system.
A lot of the outage indicators failed. Someone needs to create an outage indicator reliability dashboard.
A lot of them got fooled by the caching; pages for signed-out users are cached heavily and those kept returning successful responses even if the actual backend server was down.
This site also got it right: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news
I believe it's because they accept user reports.
Yes! Now we see what a difference it makes.
And an outage reliability indicator for that outage reliability indicator.
We apologize again for the fault in the fault indicator. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
So a downdetectorsdowndetector.com but for Hacker News?
Looks like 3 hrs
https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/incidents/yaz-eOJeARBL
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news
Strangely, nothing from the statuspal, which is the first google result
https://hacker-news.statuspal.io/
Interestingly it stayed up if you weren't logged in.
If you aren't logged in you get a cached version from the CDN/cache. Reddit works the same way.
Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).
That's how I concluded that it wasn't a ban on my account but rather more serious.
also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well.
on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.
That only worked for a while, eventually I couldn't load comment pages even logged out.
that'll be because it's served from cache when you're not logged in
As soon as I noticed it was down I came to hacker news to post about it, but...
Yeah I couldn't log in for a bit this morning. It's concerning how often and how many times I tried. Glad it's resolved.
Next time try not to beat a dead horse expecting it to resurrect. :)
So now we call the refresh button CPR?
I was quiet surprised really. HN almost never goes down.
You don't visit enough my friend :)
It's down about 8.4 minutes per week. On 26% of days it doesn't work at least once, and on 12% of days it has more than one consecutive failed check. The longest uptime streak was 24 days
I've been keeping track since exactly 2 years (to the day!) because I was surprised that it seemed briefly down for me on a daily basis. Was I getting unlucky and hitting it every time, or was it just down very often? Nobody posted anything so I started answering the question for myself :p
I've been meaning to post the tracker to HN but there's a pesky bug I want to fix: the "is it currently down" stat. I don't know how this is beyond me but something in the code bugs out. So this is my first time posting about it
Yes, and on one request I saw a message like "Restarting server - this won't take long", and soon after it's back up.
First AWS/Azure/Cloudflare and now HN?!?
Time to update the meme: https://preview.redd.it/cloudflare-had-a-rough-day-today-and...
We can live without the former, but not HN!
You won't be employed without the former.
Maybe PG is more involved now and hired the "10,000 lines of AI code a day" person who made a deployment mistake?
https://x.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236?s=46
I was able to view the site without being signed in (i.e. private window) but any browser I was logged into wouldn't load.
I'm sure it's a coincidence but it started working again shortly after emailing hn@ycombinator.com
It was the first time since I started using this website (August last year) that it was down.
I'm still impressed nonetheless.
I'd like to know what caused the outage and how it could have been prevented, for learning purposes.
https://www.stevenjgarner.com/HN-Down-2025-12-17-07-48-UTC-0...
In with the rest, yes, and my first thought is always "I have an internet outage" when HN is down. :-P
What was the longest that HN has been down? I feel like this is up there.
The "site status" apps are all smoke and mirrors, how unreliable.
In other words, productivity in tech skyrocketed for hours..though it seems some work was flavoured with irrational anger.
I got irrationally angry when it refused to load the website
you could refuse to be angry to mock it
You handle your irrational anger much better than whatevermrfukz who keeps pooping his pants.
Interesting that you mention that, how do you keep track of his comments? Some sort of plugin/scraper?
> how do you keep track of his comments?
You can just look at them, turn on showdead in your profile and you'll see a bunch of flag-killed comments in this discussion by whatevermrfukz. No need for a plugin or scraper.
thank you
Will we get a post mortem?
Yep "having trouble serving my request" or so.
We need a serious post mortem for this
Could have been accidental flagging of sorts. Didn't work on PC for few minutes while showing fine on phone.
Thought it had something to do with some model updates, like Gemini Flash 3 for a moment.
Yes, I got an error message, but I cleared my cookies and was able to access.
I have never before seen this website down.
Hi, Got an error an hour ago on phone, not loged.
Anyway, glad to see you back.
Paris 1812.
Cheers from France.
Yes, it' been out for me too, southern hemisphere, GMT -03
I'll admit this ruined my morning
Athens, Greece yes it was down.
Yup, France here , Paris 1809.
HN was down about an hour ago.
Glad to see it back !
Cheers.
Yes, was down for me too this morning
Yes was down for me. Ontario, Canada.
I got confused by the "minutes ago" thing.
Working with full dates in the HTML and doing a tiny JavaScript that calculates the "minutes ago" would actually be a neat improvement.
Yes, it was down for a few hours
Thought for a second I got banned for something lol
I thought I was being rate-limited for opening posts too fast, which has happened before.
After more than an hour I thought, "wow this is pretty harsh" and "so much of my exposure to learning things is directly tied to HN posts". I was lost lol.
Your comment history doesn't sound IP-ban-worthy. Is there an alt that has you worried? :P
Me too and I was wondering what I did!
hn applied ycombinator too strictly
I tried to refresh an embarrassing amount of times
HN being down makes you start wondering about the differences between routine, addiction, compulsion, and habit.
It was down if you tried to access it while authenticated (i.e. you have a cookie). It was loading fine for unauthenticated sessions (e.g. incognito).
Yes
I run the app called HACK and received user emails that the HN website was down.
Thank you for HACK. I love it!
Yes
I wake up, and look at HackerNews lol. This morning sucked hahaha
Yes, I had to touch grass this morning.
Yeah & chatgpt was trying to gaslight me - claiming it was my fault. Happy to put that bum in its place...
You use ChatGPT to know it a site is down?
Just a month ago, I got downvoted to -2 for saying HN for being self-hosted hasn't shown up as more reliable than something behind Cloudflare. My point is made.
Edit: Now it happens again. Knee jerk defenses all the way down.
Keep in mind that votes aren't supposed to be about whether you agree or disagree, but whether a comment adds substance to the thread. A good question that makes a wrong assumption can be worth upvoting; a correct but fairly irrelevant statement about politics not (to give a relatively obvious example)
Being "voted to -2" doesn't necessarily mean you were wrong (it often correlates though). People might just think it wasn't relevant in whatever context you posted it in
I often find it hard to tell what makes people think something I write is not helpful (or sometimes also a comment someone else made) and thus appreciate comments that clarify constructively. It can also help to ask for clarification if you're particularly surprised about the votes on a given post
Unless the downtime was caused by something Cloudflare would've prevented, this downtime would've happened regardless of being behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare adds another single point of failure.
Could this be a self-inflicted bug? In that case, the broader point still stands: cloud providers can cause outages that are outside your direct realm of responsibility.
Your VPS server and your data center and the ISP your data center uses and the AS system your ISP uses all can cause outages outside your direct realm of responsibility.
You're probably being downvoted today for your "I was smarter than you" tone.
Complaining about downvotes usually gets you more downvotes, so the response here isn't really that surprising.
It's absolutely irresistible downvoting people who preemptively complain about being downvoted like you do. It really made my day. Post another complaint so I can do it again please! It's not knee jerk when you explicitly ask for it, by leading with a complaint about downvoting, instead of just making your point and letting it fall or rise on its own merits. You're the one who put the idea of downvoting you into my head in the first place.