Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-down-subreddits-protest-not-working-b2356013.html
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’m curious about why the most popular subreddits going private would stress out their servers. Wouldn’t that reduce load?
They might be getting DDoSed.
Another possibility is that many of the closed subreddits link to a single thread in Save3rdpartyapps for an explanation. That page was returning gateway timeouts over the last few days. Since it has tens of thousands of comments, the sorting algorithm might be timing out from people visiting that particular page.
Reddit folks came out saying that with so many private subreddits the server struggled to build the front page for people.
I know that even after my small (~26,000 users) went dark I STILL received a spam posting!
So dark means nothing to spam bots unfortunately
Down detector doesn’t actually “detect” if a site is down right? It just shows how many people are reporting that a site is down. If an unaware user logs on and every subreddit they visit says “this subreddit does not exist,” they might think there’s something wrong with reddit’s servers and report it.
Edit: just read the article, I see that its more than that
I would guess it’s related to making all the content of the subs private. For large subs that would mean crawling millions of posts/comments.
It doesn’t need to update every individual link or comment, the “private” property is just on the subreddit itself. There is probably an index on the “private” property so filtering on that property is cheap.
Sources:
Well, that certainly looks like it’s implemented in a sane way. I would still assume that somehow it needs to trawl every post. E.g. due to search engine indexing and requesting removal from them or due to tracking/ad related things.
It has probably messed with their sever scaling system.