Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world.

Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-down-subreddits-protest-not-working-b2356013.html

The mass outage comes amid a major boycott from thousands of the site’s administrators, who are protessting new changes to the platform.

On 12 June, popular sub-Reddits like r/videos and r/bestof went dark in retaliation to proposed API (Application Programming Interface) charges for third-party app developers.

Among the apps impacted by the new pricing is popular iOS app Apollo, which announced last week that it was unable to afford the new costs and would be shutting down.

Apollo CEO Christian Selig claimed that Reddit would charge up to $20 million per year in order to operate, prompting the mass protest from Reddit communities.

In a Q&A session on Reddit on Friday, the site’s CEO Steve Huffman defended the new pricing.

“Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” said Mr Huffman, who goes by the Reddit username u/spez.

“For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”

In response to the latest outage, one Reddit user wrote on Twitter: “Spez, YOU broke Reddit.”

Website health monitor DownDetector registered more than 7,000 outage reports for Reddit on Monday.

Some users were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.”

Others received an error warning that stated: “Our CDN [content delivery network] was unable to reach our servers.”

Update: Seems to be resolved for most users

  • Clbull@beehaw.orgEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    Beehaw is getting hammered with traffic and is really slow today. I wonder if there’s been a mass exodus to Lemmy…

    • 1993_toyota_camry@beehaw.orgEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      Beehaw is getting hammered with traffic and is really slow today.

      They’ve really turned it around over the past few hours though. Fast as hell now.

    • treebeard@beehaw.orgEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been watching the stats since the blackout announcement. According to the Lemmy page on the federation info stats site, Lemmy gained about 10,000 users just last night.

    • DRx@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      I’ve tried 10ish alts today… Lemmy so far has my vote for best alt, others probably feel the same

    • Variden3301@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      Hello I am a reddit refugee. And I am happy to find open source alternatives to things I use. Thanks to all the devs here!!!

    • Dandylion@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I’ve noticed the slowness too over here, but embracing it as it must mean a huge increase in traffic, which makes me super happy. Welcome to all the refugees!!

  • heartlessevil@lemmy.oneEnglish
    23·
    1 year ago

    I’m curious about why the most popular subreddits going private would stress out their servers. Wouldn’t that reduce load?

    They might be getting DDoSed.

    Another possibility is that many of the closed subreddits link to a single thread in Save3rdpartyapps for an explanation. That page was returning gateway timeouts over the last few days. Since it has tens of thousands of comments, the sorting algorithm might be timing out from people visiting that particular page.

    • tinawebmom @lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      I know that even after my small (~26,000 users) went dark I STILL received a spam posting!

      So dark means nothing to spam bots unfortunately

    • spoonful@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Reddit folks came out saying that with so many private subreddits the server struggled to build the front page for people.

    • rustyspoon@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Down detector doesn’t actually “detect” if a site is down right? It just shows how many people are reporting that a site is down. If an unaware user logs on and every subreddit they visit says “this subreddit does not exist,” they might think there’s something wrong with reddit’s servers and report it.

      Edit: just read the article, I see that its more than that

    • Garrathian@beehaw.orgEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      It’ll normalize a bit and you’ll start seeing more diverse content. Some will quit reddit cold turkey, some will do what i do and hop back and forth, some will just go back and deal. I like it here though so im sticking around at least

      • RaincoatsGeorge@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        So far this seems the closest to what I was getting through reddit. After these fools doubled down I’m eager to find a new place to get the same basic functionality. We will see if this is it or not.

    • wxboss@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I just quit Reddit cold turkey. For me, I needed to be rid of it as I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time on it. I went ahead and deleted my account. I feel much better now that I have removed it from my life.

      • Monkeytennis@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Same, It feels similar to when I quit Facebook. The difference with Reddit is the incredible resource of knowledge and the fact it’s usually top of any search results.

        So, I’ve quit browsing cold turkey, but I won’t stop using it to get specific information (unless they force me to get their official app).

  • camelCaseGuy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    I’m still incredibly surprised that by taking closing communities you get your servers down. Usually it should be the other way around, but god dammit they screwed that infra somehow, somewhere.

  • deo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    “What we had today wasn’t a complete drop in traffic, engagement, and a resulting significant downturn in the number of served ads, caused by the major boycott we’re in the middle of, guys, that was just a major outage. We still have great expectations for the IPO.”

    – spez, probably

      • threefriend@beehaw.orgEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Maybe. But also maybe they were looking at internal data showing users leaving en masse to alternatives, and that was really scary compared to the known-quantity of what happens when the site goes down for maintenance.

      • kickinitlegit@lemmy.oneEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        One would think, but as we’ve seen, they aren’t making the best decisions. Could also be they’re taking it down to make changes with moderation? But either way, you are correct, it’s not good right as they’re going public.

    • zero_iq@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      That or rushing through untested changes to minimise its visibility, leading to site breakage.

  • Grenfur@lemmy.oneEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    Reddit has entered the “Fuck round and find out” portion of their journey.

  • astronomy_geek@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    “We’re offline working to restore access to subreddits that went private for some reason” - Reddit, probably later today

  • Eddie Hitler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Seems that the past couple of days some subreddits have been removing links that suggest migration to any alternatives such as Lemmy, Kbin and Mastadon. Hopefully the exodus continues!!!