My guess is cascading effect of failures (slower delivery of messages, some internal connection issues, probably degraded database and etc.) that caused a bigger problem that they're trying to fix. That, or DNS.
>All: our poor server is smoking today* so I've had to reduce the page size of comments. There are already a thousand comments in this thread but if you want to read more than a few dozen you'll need to page through them by clicking the More link at the bottom. I apologize!
>Also, if you're cool with read-only access, just log out and all will be fast again.
>* yes, HN still runs on one core, at least the part that serves logged-in requests, and yes this will all get better someday...it kills me that this isn't done yet but one day you will all see