Yep, I think your takeaway is exactly the right one, about planning in advance for outages.

I didn't post to try and make HN look bad, using the wrong http status code isn't a huge deal or anything. I just wanted to take the opportunity to discuss http response codes, an issue near to my heart. (In my day job at an academic library, the fact that most of the vendors we deal with deliver error pages with 200s does interfere with things we'd like to do better).

Thanks for the reply!