> Althought their entire website is returning 500 errors, including the blog
I've been here in a similar situation, and my guess is they've:
1. Reverse-proxied /blog to a crappy Wordpress instance run without caching.
2. HN traffic killed the blog.
3. Cloudflare, in their infinite wisdom, if they see enough 5xx errors from /blog, will start returning 5xx errors for every uri on the site, with some opaque retry interval.
More likely the entire www. server is a CMS that fell over, and the application is on a separate subdomain, and they are only monitoring the application.
I've been here in a similar situation, and my guess is they've:
1. Reverse-proxied /blog to a crappy Wordpress instance run without caching.
2. HN traffic killed the blog.
3. Cloudflare, in their infinite wisdom, if they see enough 5xx errors from /blog, will start returning 5xx errors for every uri on the site, with some opaque retry interval.
4. Voila, the entire site appears to be dead.