Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world.
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
I heard it was r/jailbait, but I’m not sure if that’s true, just what some users have said.
That’s the sub they’re referring to but it isn’t true. Spez is a shit but that’s deliberate misinformation.
Reddit history time - back then you could make someone a mod of a subreddit and it would accept that “request” automatically. So you could make Barack Obama a moderator of your sub and it would list him. This was a very popular and silly thing done all over without any malicious intent.
Well the guy who ran jailbait, violentacrez, did this to spez with the jailbait sub. He then shared that spez was a mod there and many users “confirmed” it, until the mounting pressure got brought to his attention and he removed himself. Shortly after you had to accept moderator positions when they were offered, it was no longer automatic, and I’m pretty sure around the same time is when the sub finally got banned.
The folks in dankmemes are old edgelords who probably frequented jailbait, they’re bringing up an old joke they pulled on spez since he’s in the hot seat. Don’t repeat their tripe, instead point out how Huffman once implied he expects he will be able to buy slaves in the near future and looks forward to such a day with anxious anticipation.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
As far as I can tell, Lemmy also auto-accepts moderators, but you can only do it with people who have posted or commented in the relevant community, because the “add as Moderator” button only shows up there.