A lot of them got fooled by the caching; pages for signed-out users are cached heavily and those kept returning successful responses even if the actual backend server was down.

This site also got it right: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/hacker-news

I believe it's because they accept user reports.

Yes! Now we see what a difference it makes.

And an outage reliability indicator for that outage reliability indicator.

We apologize again for the fault in the fault indicator. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

So a downdetectorsdowndetector.com but for Hacker News?