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Weird that the link is for ?down=true

I thought this is some kind of prank, but http://facebook.com is also showing up as down.

HN doesn't allow for duplicate links[^1] so the submitter used the query string to bypass that.

[^1]: There's some new rules about this IIRC but I don't remember exactly what cases allow for duplicate links now.

that was probably to get around the duplicate url check.

It was. There was another post here from 271 days ago that linked directly to facebook.com, also reporting an outage.