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 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.