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

  • Viclan@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    I also think the abundance of content is a part of the issue, but with no clear solution. People are bombarded with a thousand stories about a thousand different things going on in their country, the world, their city, etc… But we know that Humans can only reasonably maintain around 150-200 close personal relationships max that you would be able to converse with and empathize with and what not, Dunbars number.

      I think this is part of the problem why people see everything in black and white imo, there's an abundance of information out there and our society currently is in a state where everyone has to have an opinion on every conceivable subject but that's just not feasible. And when there's so much information to parse through humans tend to group things together as we love our patterns. So if you believe an idea from this group of people, you must believe the 100 other possible interpretations of correlated subjects and what not, or at least that's how people tend to view others expressing certain viewpoints.
    
    I struggle with this and people who espouse hateful ideas and disinformation against Trans people, a lot of people may not know any better or believe that there's this widespread push to transition people as young as possible which just isn't the case. It's something I find hard to extend grace on, it feels morally wrong to prevent people from making informed decisions between themselves and their healthcare specialist and besides that it is such a tiny portion of the population to be focusing on when there are much bigger widespread issues that affect us all. But its also something I feel is fueled a bit by this same issue we are discussing, I'm honestly not sure how you would work against this besides smaller and more tight-knit communities but then you have echo chambers, not that it wasn't a problem in some subreddits as well. Very interesting thing to think about! Love hearing everyones thoughts!