Reddit's Latest Major Outage Hit Both Desktop And Mobile
If you tried logging into Reddit today and received an error message instead, you aren't alone. On Wednesday, the controversial social network updated its Status website to indicate it was experiencing "elevated error rates," which it labeled as a major outage without any additional details. Unlike some recent issues, this particular incident impacted both the desktop version of Reddit and its official mobile apps — and any third-party apps that may remain following its recent API change, though there aren't many left.
Assuming you could access the website, many features still worked as expected, including voting, commenting, and playing videos. However, complaints from impacted users indicated that when applicable, users were unable to open the website and get content to load in the mobile apps, instead seeing an error page or being faced with endless attempts at loading. The issue appeared widespread, with reports surfacing from users located around the world.
The reason for this outage remains unclear
At this time, Reddit hasn't revealed what caused this particular outage, and it is possible that issues may continue to linger for some users throughout the day. The company updated the official Reddit Status website to list the outage as "resolved" at 3:15 p.m. ET / 5:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday, and if history is anything to go by, that'll likely mark the end of this particular incident.
This is the first major outage to occur on Reddit since the network was the subject of a user-base-wide protest this past June. Thousands of subreddits had gone private, or "blacked out," in protest of rules that would require users to pay for the usage of application programming interface (API) software. However, due to the protests subsiding in recent weeks, it is unlikely that any remaining protests among subreddits are responsible for this particular outage.