He Googled “thisvid 502 bad gateway” and found a ghost town of Reddit posts from years earlier. The same question, asked every few months: “Is it down for you too?” And the same replies: “Give it an hour.” But those posts were from 2018, 2020. No one had reported an outage this long since… ever.

On the seventh day, the Discord got a ping from Sam: “I got ahold of the admin’s old roommate. He says the guy moved to Thailand last year. The server is still in the Columbus basement, but the building changed owners. No one knows if it’s even plugged in anymore.”

“The 502 means the gateway server—the thing that routes traffic—can’t talk to the origin server,” Sam explained in a voice channel at 2 a.m. “Could be a crashed process. Could be the hard drive finally ate itself. Could be the admin’s power got cut and he doesn’t care anymore.”