It's the billions of people who have been trying to use it all day logging in and trying to update their feeds and catch up on what they missed that's slowing it down, not the small city of nerds clicking the title through HN. Facebook (and subsidiaries like Instagram hosted in the same DCs) normally receive more requests per minute than HN receives in a month.
I think HN might've caused another outage by hugging it to death like many other websites that landed on the front page.