I've honestly never understood why these sorts of posts (even for those larger companies with services everyone relies on) get so much traction on HN. I can very easily tell for myself when a site is down, and it's not hard to find most companies' service status page. Sure, if a few days later we get an interesting/detailed post-mortem from the company, I'd find that interesting, but "X is down" does not tickle me intellectually at all, and just wastes a slot on the front page. The inevitable speculation as to whether it was a bad deploy, a bad configuration update, a DDoS attack, whatever, is just not really interesting, though I guess (IMO unfortunately) enough people here find it interesting.

Of course, I'm here commenting, so somehow I got enticed to click through to the comments, so who knows what that says about me...