That one should be on the front page.

Disagree completely. I’d much rather have a link to a trustworthy source than a random person writing “Tell HN: WhatsApp is down”. The post you think should be frontpage is useless imo. Take the time to link to a source instead of trying to beat everyone to the punch to get a little karma.

I don't understand why it's not given recency + votes

yeah, but people just can't be bothered to check if maybe the big thing that happened in the last 30 minutes could possibly have been submitted already before posting submission number 10 about it, so that's what happens.

It's not that they can't be bothered - it's that they want to be the one that posts with the upvotes/attention