Hacker News Reader

Curious: What kind architecture shows a 503 error when your servers are dead (like they are currently doing), but can't show an error status page? Presumably that server is not in the dead datacenter.

Or is it just that something at the datacenter level is redundant?

View on HN

We've shut down all of our servers to protect data, except some of the outermost infrastructure and gateways. That 503 is coming from HAProxy, our load balancer -- it's unable to send your traffic to any of the (powered-down) servers.

Any kind of front-end reverse proxy could be doing that. At a complete guess, might they be using cloudflare?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com