brucethemoose2 3 years ago

I know HN is getting hugged right now, but many other websites on mobile and landline internet (in the southern US) are chugging for me.

A conspicuous number of services are showing outages on downdetector and thousandeyes.

  • TheAceOfHearts 3 years ago

    Is HN struggling so much due to the Apple event or is there another explanation?

    • humanistbot 3 years ago

      no, something is going on across all the sites I visit

    • brucethemoose2 3 years ago

      It could be both? A wider outage at a high traffic time.

      HN is timing out constantly for me. So are some Microsoft services. But then some other websites are loading fine...

      • midasuni 3 years ago

        HN timeouts only applied while logged in with me

        • dang 3 years ago

          Correct - logged out pages are cached and should serve much faster.

          • dredmorbius 3 years ago

            NB, someone was commenting a week ago that HN was observed as faster when logged in, not out:

            <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36117794>

            • dang 3 years ago

              Like any typical developer, my response is "that shouldn't be happening".

              If it is happening, that would be most interesting - but we'd need to test to be sure.

              • dredmorbius 3 years ago

                Yeah, that's my sense as well.

                Speculation was that it might have been anti-bot countermeasures.

                I've ... encountered those a few times recently doing my HN front-page research. Though not presenting as latency.

          • midasuni 3 years ago

            That would imply a slowness on the server and not with general internet peering

            • dang 3 years ago

              Correct.

    • ftxbro 3 years ago

      > "is there another explanation?"

      It's aliens. They literally announced they have been reverse engineering space ships from aliens from outer space. I mean I don't think it's true but it's what they announced.

      • b112 3 years ago

        After I read your comment, I googled.

        No one official announced anything. Instead an "insider" claims this. Among the claims, is that aliens are working with governements, and provided key tech, such as fiber optics, and silicon chips.

        Yeah. OK.

        I can literay, over a century, trace all the key scientific discoveries, how they happened, for transistors, ICs, etc. There was no help.

        And shining light through glass isn't that fancy of a tech.

        These articles piss me off. They belittle the capabilities of humans, for profit.

        • sterlind 3 years ago

          I really wish the aliens would hurry up and give us fusion power already, and maybe the cure to all diseases, a theory of everything and quantum computing while they're at it. I didn't need compact discs that badly.

      • greggsy 3 years ago

        This is where HN devolves into Reddit joke threads

    • entropie 3 years ago

      I have serious routing/peering issues all day long from germany (vodafone).

      Dyndns is struggling also for me the entire day.

    • dang 3 years ago

      I haven't dug into the logs but I assume it's the Apple announcement.

      Major perf improvements are coming (fingers crossed), but alas not yet. Sorry all!

      • lostmsu 3 years ago

        Wait, you can make that thing even faster?

        • dang 3 years ago

          HN is painfully slow to me, partly because it chokes under load, and partly because nearly all software is painfully slow to me. It can definitely get a lot faster.

  • trillic 3 years ago

    I setup a few ping monitors and have been trouble routing to Google all day. Intermittent packet loss. The other three I setup (Cloudflare, L3, and ATT) are all good. Funny enough I have Google Fiber, so I really have no clue what's going on.

basementcat 3 years ago

Might some of the trouble be related to the lower Manhattan internet outage today? https://hellgatenyc.com/lower-manhattans-internet-is-down

  • ftxbro 3 years ago

    > "We have identified the problem as a street cut impacting hundreds of fiber-optic strands"

    • 7ero 3 years ago

      Not sure if this would cause larger regional harm, but anecdotally there were issues connecting to our US east VPN at work.

    • nubinetwork 3 years ago

      Interesting, usually this sort of thing turns up on the NANOG mailing list, but it's been pretty quiet over there.

      • b112 3 years ago

        NANOG seems mostly dead these days?

        It was so active 10+ years ago, but I think it's basically gone?

        • nubinetwork 3 years ago

          Yeah I'm not sure what's up with that... I remember reading a thread on it last year about fires at various Colo DC'S.

xboxnolifes 3 years ago

I don't know if this was related, but earlier today my personal internet dropped to 1mbps down for at least 30 minutes. Also had 40% packet loss using the cloudflare speed test on a wired connection. East coast, USA.

  • el_benhameen 3 years ago

    I had the same thing happen. I assumed it was my suboptimal wifi setup acting up again and almost got back to researching mesh systems.

    • drewmol 3 years ago

      I’ve come to love powerline adapters when expanding Wi-Fi coverage just in case you haven’t looked into them. Speeds of the latest adapters are up to 2.4Gbps!

  • bsagdiyev 3 years ago

    We had what seemed like full connectivity loss for about 5 minutes this morning. Came back as quick as it went, Spectrum fiber outside Raleigh, NC.

napsterbr 3 years ago

One additional data point that I didn't see mentioned elsewhere yet:

Earlier today it took ~10 minutes for a Cloudflare worker of mine to be updated after a deployment was made. This usually happens instantly.

Very likely unrelated to a hypothetical wider outage, but thought I'd share anyway.

acomjean 3 years ago

Perhaps. Our outlook mail failed today. They said its back, but its still kind of flaky.

  • rayiner 3 years ago

    Oh shit. I assumed outlook was being flaky because my inbox is 10gb.

    • unstatusthequo 3 years ago

      Nothing. Have seen ones over 125gb. Something to strive for? ;)

mindcrash 3 years ago

Here in Europe traffic to cloud services from US based companies has been sluggish or completely disfunctional for days.

For example: Microsoft's Xbox app works but is superslow, and this weekend I couldn't even sign in in the EA app anymore for some reason.

gnicholas 3 years ago

HN has been slow/failing for me today. I assumed it was the WWDC keynote, in particular the One More Thing...

  • loloquwowndueo 3 years ago

    Um what? That’s not how the internet works.

    • wongarsu 3 years ago

      HN having server issues when a single post gets 1200 comments in two hours is pretty normal. I don't think any issues with the wider internet are implied

    • bobs_salsa 3 years ago

      I think they meant the keynote resulted in massive traffic to HN resulting in HN giving itself the hug of death.

      Totally plausible provided the overlap in communities.

ggm 3 years ago

I like the second-order effect here, of measuring how people TALK about the outage to measure the outage.

Have a read of:

“Is my Internet down?”: Sifting through User-Affecting Outages with Google Trends Ege Cem Kırcı, Martin Vahlensieck, and Laurent Vanbever IMC '22

which is also discussed on PING (podcast at APNIC) and on the APNIC blog (disclaimer: I helped publish this)

https://blog.apnic.net/2023/02/10/towards-a-systematic-user-...

https://blubrry.com/ping_podcast/93464445/is-my-internet-dow...

deathanatos 3 years ago

Now I'm wondering if this is how I got "Server Error" while trying to initiate a POTS call. First time I've ever gotten that.

HN also feels sluggish today.

  • jkingsman 3 years ago

    As in, something spoke the words "Server Error" to you when you tried to dial out?

    • deathanatos 3 years ago

      No, actually, the Android phone app put those on the screen.

      (And yeah, not the more familiar/classic POTS voice message "We're sorry, the number you dialed…")

      (Quite … uselessly, too. An error in text form when the phone is against my ear is not helpful.)

Solvency 3 years ago

HN and Reddit have been tanking for hours for me.

nubinetwork 3 years ago

Most of the websites I use have been fine, outside of the odd hiccups while browsing HN.

  • World177 3 years ago

    HN is working without issue for me if I log out of my account. I was worried that my account was suspended for some unknown reason until I saw this post.

    • ceejayoz 3 years ago

      Logged-out page views hit the cache. Logged-in ones don’t.

  • doompilot 3 years ago

    It is the hiccup that have been worring me in the past week. I've gotten 502 or error json files from banking, imdb, online doc for some api, gmail, but a retry fixed the issue always. It is not as sexy as all websites are down, but all website are of dubious quality now.

hunter2_ 3 years ago

Had trouble with Google Chat messages getting queued. They automatically retried and were delivered only after restarting the device (Android). This was approximately 2.5 hours ago.

benjaminwootton 3 years ago

I’ve had problems in the UK with Netflix and PlayStation network.

1970-01-01 3 years ago

No, it's just HN going crazy for shiny new Apples.

  • vrosas 3 years ago

    What if we took down _every_ website for our product announcements??

    - some Apple PM, probably

    • PeterWhittaker 3 years ago

      You win the internet today.

      Not much of a prize, today, maybe you can get a rain check.

livinglist 3 years ago

I thought I was being restricted by admin when I wasn’t able to upvote posts on HN, glad to know I’m not the only one.

leto_ii 3 years ago

In Bucharest I've had problems throughout the day. Most noticeably just now while streaming on HBO Max.

whalesalad 3 years ago

I blame it on Diablo 4 launch.

ardit33 3 years ago

HN Slow..... Outlook failing for me, some other sites a bit slower than usual

mind-blight 3 years ago

Uber was pretty spotty in the UK for a few hours today across multiple devices

Daunk 3 years ago

I guess it was a bad day to try out my new internet provider...

Dwedit 3 years ago

Had internet outage from the cable ISP.

joshuanapoli 3 years ago

developer.apple.com for account management has also been down most of the day.

  • hkchad 3 years ago

    They always take down apple.com during a WWDC