Reddit, a popular social media site, encountered severe issues Wednesday afternoon, going down without warning. Upon attempting to visit the home page, there was a high chance users would be greeted with an error page that said “Our CDN was unable to reach our servers. Please check www.redditstatus.com if you consistently get this error.”
If users chose to visit that status page, they’d see a notification denoting elevated error rates for the site. As of 1:58 p.m. PT, the latest update on the page read “Investigating – We are currently investigating elevated error rates across Reddit.” At 2:34 p.m. PT, that status changed to “Identified – The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
When asked for comment, a Reddit spokesperson said the has been identified and a fix is being implemented, noting that it should be resolved “in the next few minutes.”
Regardless, the site remained inaccessible to many users for a brief window of time, with Down Detector reports spiking to a count of over 27,000 within one hour, indicating a large portion of the community was having difficulty accessing the platform and its contents.
This widespread, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it outage is far from the only instance of Reddit having something of a sitewide blackout in recent times; over the past few weeks, Reddit’s been embroiled in drama revolving around the site’s controversial policy changes that alter the financial landscape third-party app developers face when making applications for the platform.
Reddit’s policy changes were so unpopular with the Reddit community that many site moderators started internal revolts, closing down sections of the website in protest. This led to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman using some choice words to describe moderators and their actions, escalating the increasingly public feud.
Since then, much of Reddit has reopened and the fiercest heat from the protests has worn off, despite continued efforts from some areas of the site — such as certain sections of Reddit being deliberately incorrectly labeled by moderators as “not safe for work” in order to deny Reddit advertising space, since ads don’t mix with the site’s NSFW corners.
