Social media site Reddit experiences outage
Reddit, a popular social media site, experienced an outage this afternoon. Downdetector.com, a site that tracks online service outages, listed Reddit as the first company facing issues at the time of writing. At 2:46 pm EDT, there were nine complaints recorded against Reddit, which increased to 66,717 by 3:16 pm EDT. Even at 5:46 pm EDT, over 26,000 users reported that Reddit was still down.
Reddit’s response to the outage
Reddit’s status page confirms the outage with three comments from the company. The earliest message at 3:18 pm EDT reads, “Investigating – Reddit is currently offline. We’re working to identify the issue.” It was followed by another at 3:56 pm EDT, which stated, “Identified – We’ve identified an internal systems issue and are working to determine a fix.” The most recent comment at 7:18 pm EDT reads, “Update – We’ve implemented our fix and are slowly allowing things to ramp back up. We’re not yet out of the woods. How do you draw a banana? Asking for a friend.”
Cause of the outage
A majority (55%) of the complaints against Reddit were related to the social media site’s iOS or Android app, while 33% reported not being able to access Reddit’s website. Interestingly, Reddit provides users with an option to track the functionality of its service over the last 30 days – this shows that during this period, the company’s desktop website was up and running for 99.49% of the time, and the mobile apps have been working for 99.57% of the time.
Users’ response to the outage
Many users expressed their frustration on other social media platforms, including Twitter. One user, Just Liz, tweeted, “Seems weird that I would need to come to a competing platform to find out what’s going on at your platform.”
At 6:37 pm, Reddit shared a tweet, reassuring users that their site would be up and running again soon, saying, “Enjoy the productivity. We’ll be up and running again soon.”
