Reddit Returns Hours After Internal Bug Caused Major Outage
Reddit, the popular social media website that largely made forums a thing of the past, suffered a major outage on March 14. The company confirmed the issues with a brief message on the Reddit Status website that stated the platform was "offline." This isn't the first time the site has gone down.
The offline status was confirmed on the Reddit Status page at 3:18 p.m. ET, though the company didn't have an explanation at the time. Unlike most outages the platform has experienced, this one was still underway hours later. The second status update was delivered at approximately 4 p.m., with the company advising users that "an internal systems issue" was the cause of the outage.
A third status update was offered around 6:40 p.m. on the same day, with Reddit announcing that it discovered a fix for the problem, but with the caveat that it'll take some time for it to actually implement the solution. In the meantime, the company told its disgruntled users, "Ready your bananas," and made a subreddit called /r/downtimebananas available.
Desktop and mobile web were hit the hardest
According to the Reddit Status web page, users were unlikely to be able to access the platform using a web browser regardless of whether it was on a computer, a tablet, or a smartphone. The company's mobile app — the official one that many people continue to ignore in favor of third-party alternatives — was listed as having a "partial outage," meaning users had some luck accessing their favorite subreddits with it while the fix was still underway.
In an update on the Reddit Status website, the company announced that its teams were ramping the website back up to full operation after implementing the fix. Just ahead of 9 p.m. Eastern time, Reddit changed its status to reveal that all systems were operational and that the platform was back up and running on all devices, including mobile web. The company hasn't shed any additional light on what caused the platform to go offline.