That sounds more like your work added some new rules to their filter that bans some of the the content here. Using https would encrypt that content and keep the filter from scanning it. Now you just have to hope that they don't ban it by url.
No, I can assure you that's not the case, unless Comcast decided to do it. It appears to be fine now, but for this week we were getting 0 byte responses from port 80, but everything working fine over HTTPS.
Have you tried loading: https://news.ycombinator.com/?