HN Downtime

Dang typically posts when there's been a major or extended outage or performance degradation. HN also has a twitter feed, (https://twitter.com/hnstatus) @hnstatus, which gets information about issues.

Small hiccups like what you experienced occasionally happen but don't seem to get write-ups unless, again, it's widespread enough or long enough to have had a noticeable impact.

Hacker News is notoriously reliable, I would suspect they're only down a handful of minutes per month...