The popular online forum Reddit experienced outages hours after thousands of Reddit communities launched a protest against its policy to charge third-party apps for data access, NBC News reported.
“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some unexpected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” Reddit said in a statement to NBC News.
During an outage Monday morning, the website’s front page showed empty Reddit posts with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.” Users were unable to load posts on it until the platform resumed working again.
According to NBC News, the #RedditBlackout hashtag started trending on Twitter after the blackout began, with more than 4,238 tweets associated with the term as of Monday. Reddit was trending with more than 112,000 searches on the social media platform. Twitter users as early as 9 a.m. noted that Reddit was experiencing technical issues.
One user’s tweet about the Reddit outage received more than 80,000 views within an hour. “Nice to see even Reddit itself getting in on the Reddit Blackout today,”, the user wrote.
The Verge reported that in an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the “noise” and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventually pass.
The Verge received a copy of an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff. Here is part of the memo:
“…Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do not anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you team.
We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.
There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are to stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail…
…I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful or wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations…”
In my opinion, this memo is a bit shortsighted. The CEO thinks that this will blow over and things will go right back to “normal”. Based on the sheer number of subreddits that have gone private, it appears that many people are not thrilled with Reddits’ decisions right now. As such, I think the private subreddits could stay private for a long time.