Reddit down: Site hit by outage as fight over its future continues

Latest outage not connected to ongoing protests

Reddit communities are planning to go dark on 12 June, 2023, in protest to API charges (iStock/ Getty Images)

Reddit was hit by yet another outage, as the site’s troubles continue.

The latest outage is not related to the ongoing action taking place on Reddit, the company said.

The forum has been hit by protests and outrage in recent days, in response to a new policy that would see the site charge for access to its data.

Reddit said that it was unfair that developers were given free access to its API, which allow them to show posts in third-party apps. But developers said that Reddit’s new pricing was too expensive to be sustainable, and many of the biggest of those apps have now announced they will be permanently shutting down.

Those announcements have led to a widespread protest on Reddit, where some moderators announced they would be taking their forums “dark” in an attempt to force a change by the site’s leadership. Those administrators switched those forums to private and hid posts, meaning that they were effectively taken offline.

That protest ran from 12 June to 14 June. But many of those administrators have suggested that recent actions by Reddit’s management, and the lack of change on the issue of pricing, will lead them to carry on the protest indefinitely.

Amid those issues, Reddit went briefly offline for some users on Thursday evening. The company said that it was “investigating an issue that is causing load failures across web and mobile clients”.

Around an hour and a half later, the company said the incident was resolved.

But it was the second such technical issue the company has experienced as the protest has continued. Earlier this week, users saw another problem that meant they were unable to get to posts.

Reddit spokespeople later confirmed that the first round of problems had been a result of the protests, though the more recent outage was not. The large number of forums being taken on and offline had caused issues for the site’s infrastructure, they said, meaning that it was briefly taken offline.

The protests have come at a time of an unusual number of technical issues at Reddit. Between 19 March and 14 May, the site experienced no issues, according to its tracking website – but the last five days have seen two significant problems.

Nonetheless, the company still says it is experiencing 99.94 per cent uptime. Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief executive, has urged Reddit’s staff to continue working on the site and suggested that the protest will eventually pass.