This is a bit silly. Anytime a (very active) social site goes down for a few minutes, people are interested in what happened, why, and what is being considered to prevent it going further.
There's no doubt that the whole time it was down, these questions were being asked -- both by PG and co. as well as the end users.
Not that we expect immediate and concrete answers, but it's certainly expected that the question will come up.
And it's pretty common for services to post a quick update stating the issue, cause, and postmortem at a high level, once service has been restored.
I know I try to do this every time my site goes down for even a couple minutes, let alone ~24 hours, and it has nowhere near the activity of HN.
Several HNers have the same question, thus the reason it is the top-voted new post.
I'm saying, though, that asking this alone doesn't make them a point sniffer. Somebody was bound to ask it within minutes of service being restored because I'm sure everyone was curious of this after seeing HN go down for several hours.
I know it was on my mind, just out of curiosity, and was one of the first topics I looked for when I found service had been restored.
There's no doubt that the whole time it was down, these questions were being asked -- both by PG and co. as well as the end users.
Not that we expect immediate and concrete answers, but it's certainly expected that the question will come up.
And it's pretty common for services to post a quick update stating the issue, cause, and postmortem at a high level, once service has been restored.
I know I try to do this every time my site goes down for even a couple minutes, let alone ~24 hours, and it has nowhere near the activity of HN.
Several HNers have the same question, thus the reason it is the top-voted new post.