I think that HN is struggling because there are two very high comment count discussions on the front page right now ("GPT-4" and "Meta plans to lay off 10k employees"). Also perhaps because people with accounts in both places are coming here more to fill in their idle time since Reddit is down.

I don’t ever want to be asked to do a system design interview for a YC startup when HN is crushed this much by just few high traffic posts.

You're safe. No YC startup would ever build a system like HN. (Except maybe if I ever start another one.)

Neither HN or Reddit use Cloudflare, but I’m having problems with both too.

Wonder if there's a bigger routing issue or possible DDOS attempts against both sites?

AWS seems to be having problems. Again.

https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

There goes the argument that AWS is a solution to those wanting many 9s of availability.