New Delhi: Reddit, which is one of the most popular social media sites in the world, experienced a huge service outage on Wednesday morning, rendering users worldwide unable to access their favourite communities. The site and mobile app both went offline, lasting several hours, leaving users frustrated as they attempted to browse, post, or comment.
Downdetector showed over 138,000 users reported problems in the U.S. alone at the peak of the outage. Reddit was fast to react by accepting the problem and trying to rectify it. Most of the platform functions went back to normal by early afternoon.
Disruption hits website and app users alike
The blackout started in the early morning and deteriorated very quickly. Complaints of affected users cited messages of error, failure to load the page, and inability to deal with the posts. They identified issues in desktop and mobile access of all types.
By 11.39 a.m. ET, more than 32,000 issues had been reported. The actual number of affected users was probably very large since many users do not complain on the monitoring sites.
Second major outage in recent weeks
It is the second large outage of Reddit in the last few weeks. Another outage occurred in June last year, affecting approximately 31,000 users, but it was of a smaller scale. The repetition of those problems can cause suspicions regarding the infrastructure of the platform.
Considering that Reddit is a source of information, discussion, and entertainment, its continuous disruption may be detrimental to user confidence and loyalty.
Community moderators hit hard
The blackout did not only affect regular users but also subreddit moderators. Others resorted to other avenues such as Twitter and Discord in order to keep in touch with what was happening during the offline period. Reddit has millions of users every day, and its communities require consistent access to continue conversations, regulate them by rules, and share content.
Service restored, but long-term fixes needed
Reddit insisted that the problem was solved, and all services were back online in the afternoon. The swift response of the company to the incident was appreciated, yet the occurrence of frequent outages in the recent past indicates that the company should review its infrastructure more closely.
By late Wednesday, the platform seemed to be functioning normally with all users’ functionality restored. In the future, Reddit will probably have to tighten their systems so that their expanding number of users around the globe can enjoy their experience more reliably.