Reddit's Site-Wide Protests Resulted In A Major Outage

If you've had trouble accessing Reddit this morning, you're not alone, as the website began the week with a major outage. The connection issues plaguing Reddit, which was the sixth-most visited website in the U.S. and the 11th-most visited in the world last month, are concurrent with massive protests by many of its users. In fact, this boycott of the company seems to be what's causing the technical problems.

According to Downdetector, the outage began shortly after 10 a.m. Eastern Time, quickly peaking about a half-hour later. On its status site, Reddit posted at 10:58 a.m. that it was aware of the problem and quickly working to fix it. Nearly two hours later, the company declared that the outage was resolved and that all systems were operational, though Downdetector still reported user issues at the time.

The outage affected Reddit across the board, including on desktop and mobile browsers, as well as apps. As for the cause, Reddit told Engadget that "a significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues." Despite Reddit seeming to anticipate problems from users' protests, the company couldn't avoid the related outage.

Reddit knew about the protest because users had made it clear that, starting today, they'd be setting their subreddits to private. This means that nobody can view these private subreddits, or read or engage with their posts unless already a member. Some of these subreddits have 10s of millions of followers each, like r/funny and r/gaming. With at least 7,000 subreddits going dark this morning, the protest includes at least 2.7 billion members.

This massive boycott, which plans to go on for 48 hours, is to protest Reddit's changes to rules involving its application programming interface (API), including charging money for access to the code that allows third parties to connect to Reddit servers. (Other companies, such as Twitter, are also making similar API changes to increase revenue.)

While there are some exceptions to the rule, including using the API for non-commercial purposes, charging for access will result in fees of millions of dollars for popular apps that many people use to engage with Reddit, such as Apollo. This has caused Apollo and other apps to shut down their services altogether, enraging many of Reddit's users. Additionally, the API changes can negatively affect the use of bots by many subreddits and their moderators.

While many of Reddit's users have made their displeasure with the changes very clear to Reddit, the company currently does not intend to rescind its plans. Further protests may lie ahead, and it's unclear if more major outages to its servers are in Reddit's future. Whether it's for technical reasons or as an intentional statement, far fewer people may be browsing Reddit for the time being.