Interestingly it stayed up if you weren't logged in.
If you aren't logged in you get a cached version from the CDN/cache. Reddit works the same way.
also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well.
on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.
That only worked for a while, eventually I couldn't load comment pages even logged out.
that'll be because it's served from cache when you're not logged in
Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).