I host a dedicated server there (running https://www.circuitlab.com/) and when I traceroute/ping news.ycombinator.com, it's two hops (and 0.175 ms) away :)
This was a BGP/routing issue and has already been documented. Please don't spread misinformation and hysteria, especially on technical issues like this
It was a misconfiguration we applied to a router in Atlanta during routine maintenance. That caused bad routes on our private backbone. As a result, traffic from any locations connected to the backbone got routed to Atlanta. It resulted in about 50% of traffic to our network to not resolve for about 20 minutes. Locations not connected to our backbone were not impacted. It was a human error. It was not an attack. It was not a failure or bug in the router. We're adding mitigations to our backbone network as we speak to ensure that a mistake like this can't have broad impacts in the future. We'll have a blog post with a full explanation up in the next hour or so — being written now by our CTO.
