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
Yeah, it is a bit of a challenge. What I did was go to here: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/4331 and find a community that I had as a subreddit. In the upper right corner, there is a blue dialog box and at the bottom there is an identifier. You copy that identifier, then go to your home server, go to search and paste that identifier. One of the search results should be that server, and you can then just hit “subscribe.”
It’s the same with Mastodon.
That said, if your server shows a listing of Communities, you might be able to subscribe from that list. Beehaw offers that.
It would be really useful if you could set your home instance and then have a direct link for adding/joining the communities that way. It’s still quite annoying to do all manually.
Or that all (subscribed?) servers automatically be notified and thus updated when a new community is created on another server.