Haha. I only avoided that reflexive action because my reflex when a large online service is down is to start typing 'news.ycom...' in my address bar and then scroll down to search :-)

Of course hilarity will ensue the day I experience a HN outage and wish to see if anyone has made a thread about it...

I did the exact same thing! Yeah, not my smartest moment either.

!ai are you down?

I didn't realise bang operators work even when DuckDuckGo itself is down.

That's pretty neat, I don't need to change the search in the address bar, just add '!g' to every search to seamlessly redirect to Google until DuckDuckGo is back.