Reddit suffers major outage — blames protesting moderators
Online discussion forum platform and news aggregator Reddit suffered a major outage on Monday, 12 June 2023, affecting its desktop and mobile sites and the mobile app.
The company blamed the outage on the moderator-initiated protest that kicked off on that same day.
“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” Engadget quoted Reddit as saying.
The outage started at around 08:00 Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) — or 17:00 in South Africa — and persisted for approximately two-and-a-half hours.
“We’re aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible,” the Reddit status page read at the time of the outage.
“We’re observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users [sic]. We will continue to closely monitor the situation,” it said about an hour later.
Reddit confirmed that the incident had been resolved at 10:26 PDT or 19:26 in South Africa.
Moderators on the platform started locking users out of subreddits on Monday, 12 June, to take a stance against Reddit’s plans to charge third-party app developers for access to the website’s data.
It is expected to last at least 48 hours, but some groups have indicated they would continue their protest longer.
The protest has made more than 3,000 subreddit groups inaccessible to users, including major pages like r/apple, r/videos, r/sports, and r/MildlyInteresting. The South African subreddits /r/southafrica and /r/RSA are also participating in the protest.
Reddit announced its plan to start charging third-party app developers, like Apollo, Reddit Is Fun, and Sync, to use its API.
However, developers have described the plan to charge for API access as prohibitive, with Apollo claiming it would have to pay Reddit $20 million (R373 million) a year.
A company spokesman said Reddit spends millions hosting its content and “needs to be fairly paid to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps.”
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