They’re asking that people stay off NYT games and cooking-related pages:
NYT Games and Cooking are BEHIND THE PICKET LINE. Please don’t play or engage with Games or Cooking content while the strike lasts!
News coverage — including election coverage — is NOT behind the picket line. It’s okay to read and share that, though the site and app may very well have problems.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for everyone to load onto that stuff to try and crash the system? Making it so the NYT has some urgency to give these workers what they want so they’ll fix it?
(Full disclosure, I don’t know what I’m talking about)
I would assume everything is running via containers which are load balanced and get recreated on crashing. Also I believe Google/Fastly is their CDN (load balancer)