Ask HN: Where have the comments gone?

I wanted to send this [1] discussion to a friend but saw that it has only 3 comments. I know that it had many before. Also, HN Search [2] says it has 229 comments. How can this happen?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8693932

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=comments+gone#!/story/forever/0/Google%20can%20now%20tell%20you%20are%20not%20a%20robot%20with%20just%20one%20click!