I don't know what was wrong, but restarting news seems to have fixed it. Whatever it was may have only affected logged in users, which may be why our auto-restarter didn't notice anything was wrong.

It might also not help, but for me, in the last hour at least accessing HN returned an empty response from the server, no errors, just no output at all.

Me too. I cleared the cookie and couldn't log back in, tried to create a test account and got the same empty response in both cases.

Don't know if it helps but it only affected pages where the logged in user info appeared in the top right.

The submit page was working all through (even when logged in).

I could modify comments during that time as well

I also confirm that it now seems to be fixed after several hours of problems.

Good call by RiderOfGiraffes on the cookie. At first I thought it might've been a DNS caching issue with Firefox, but after Wiresharking the connection it was clear that it was asking the right server, but the response was timing out (30s for Firefox). This didn't happen from other browsers or by going to 174.132.225.106 directly. In retrospect, these were all situations where the cookie would not be included...

Heh, I figured out it was the cookie, but as I had just created a second account I thought it was some sort of auto-ban for daring to create a second pseudonym.

Same problem here. I managed to get in using incognito mode on Chrome.

Edit - never mind, it doesn't really work. As soon as I try to get back to the front page after a cookie has been set I get the same problem.

Same thing happened to me. I thought pg whacked me with the banhammer.

I've been unable to access the site for a couple of hours. It magically just came back up though.

I can't access HN on Chrome at all. Firefox I can though. Someone else on Twitter can't using either. And there are other tweets reporting HN as down as well.

I've been having really spotty site connections and timeouts, though

     http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/news.ycombinator.com

says all is OK.

Intereseting example of a connectivity problem that site wouldn't spot.

I'm guessing local Cox nonsense.

I was just having the problem but it magically went away.

Using http://hackerne.ws/news worked for me.

Because the cookie is different and you would have been logged out. And PG just restarted it, making it magically go away. That's why he's our hero :D

Pretty sure it was just magic. I don't like no actual explanations to things.

I had that same problem. Apparently, everything is fine now.

I tried deleting cookies, and then I entered fine to HN. However, If I tried to login, no response again.

Then, I used links (CLI browser) to troubleshoot, and the problem was there when I tried to login. So, no idea what has happened, but something was wrong at the server side.

Since I could get in by deleting the cookie, for a while I actually thought I was banned, and was trying to remember if I've posted anything stupid lately.

Yeah, the 'incognito' trick seems to work though.

Will hacker news be creating a fail whale page?

It's back?

Apparently ;-)

now is ok, that this problem is caused by a proxy based on cookie auth?