I think this is normal, when ever a crucial Internet services or Network is down. That could be Azure, GCP, AWS, Verisign, Cloudflare, DNS attack etc.
A huge number of people comes to HN to check status. To the point HN report network / services condition earlier than any mainstream or social media. (Including their own Status Update pages ) Last time it was Google ( Storage Limit )
I haven't seen any issues with AWS. Slack seemed to be having it's own issues. Notion is having an outage as well. But otherwise, it's not widespread and none of the AWS services my group runs are having any issues. Sometimes these are coordinated DDOS attacks, but I can't imagine who would target Slack, Notion and Hacker News.
ksec didn't imply hn is a DDoS target. They pointed out that hn is usually rather slow when there are largescale infrastructure issues, because people come debate about them here.
I've noticed it many times in the past year.
E.g. when Google services had the big outage, or when AWS US-EAST-1 was down, or when Facebook SDK broke all the iOS apps, etc.
A huge number of people comes to HN to check status. To the point HN report network / services condition earlier than any mainstream or social media. (Including their own Status Update pages ) Last time it was Google ( Storage Limit )
This time it is Slack.