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Frame from The Website is Down #1: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

The Website is Down #1: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude

Josh Weinberg
Comedy
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this comedy video1 month2019–2024 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN treats it as a beloved piece of tech-workplace humor, quoted whenever an outage or sales-versus-engineering friction comes up.

A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.

“Something along similar lines that I really enjoyed was the "Website is Down" series of videos” (HN, 2019)

1 recommendations · 3 jokes · Comedy

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@pmoriarty Dec 2019 Recommends
on HN thread The Bastard Operator From Hell (1999)
Something along similar lines that I really enjoyed was the "Website is Down" series of videos, starting with "Sales Guy vs Web Dude": [this video]
Series of videos on website outages and sales versus web.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@richbell Oct 2022 Makes a joke
on HN thread How I learned about corporate firewalls
> We run a Saas and someone wrote an email saying that our server was down, and when we'd expect it to be up. Not having had a notification, I double checked from a couple of geographic locations that our application was indeed up and responding. A tale as old as time: [this video]
@Der_Einzige Jun 2023 Makes a joke
on HN thread Ask HN: How much do you work, what's your salary and how experienced are you?
Yeah, but how much of that time is actually butt in seat coding vs hardly paying attention in meetings? I've worked at multiple big firms and startups and I don't believe that even the majority of people are working "40 hours" in the same way that most people work 40 hours. This is the wonderful thing about technology. I was literally motivated to get into tech by the old "The Website is Down" videos, and in practice, it seems to be how many tech workers operate: [this video]
@samtheprogram Mar 2024 Makes a joke
on HN thread Meta outage
> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector? Have you never seen The Website Is Down? [this video] The answer is: way more people than a software developer might think. Ask anyone in IT, or go to anywhere bugs are reported and read a handful.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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