[not_kurt_godel]

You tell me. Here's a list of maybe 15 sites it's happened to on HN in just the last month: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

[Mashimo]

I also know it happens. I still don't understand why.

[not_kurt_godel]

Servers and/or their supporting infrastructure break in a million annoying ways when you throw a bunch of traffic at them. The top 2 culprits I've seen over the years are memory leaks and disks getting full from non-existent/failed log deletion/harvesting. 99.9% of those problems are effectively solved permanently and for free by using a CDN where applicable.