Just hit HN this morning and got the downtime message. Then I remembered this post and did a hard refresh to get back to normal. Browsers certainly aggressively cached it.
Same here, not sure why that isn't touted as a more important reason to provide the correct status codes rather than simply saying Google search isn't important.
I learned about doing a hard refresh on Twitter (I didn't know about this post). I think it's a big problem, there's lot of users who can't currently access the site.
