Next time you can avoid that fate by opening HN in a private browsing (or whatever your browser calls its equivalent) window. This outage, like the vast majority of HN outages, only affected logged in requests.

I suppose you could also just clear your HN cookies in regular browsing window, but then when they fix it you'd have to log in again.

Huh. Dunno why, but when it failed on Firefox I tried Chrome, and it worked. I wrote it off as a Mozilla issue, but this would better explain that I think

Is it my imagination or did they used to automatically serve you a logged out page when it was down?

I couldn't access it in private or regular.