Popular anonymous social media platform Reddit is experiencing a partial outage this weekend, meaning you may run into issues with loading posts or comments using a desktop browser or mobile app. The issues aren't substantial enough to prevent users from accessing the service but have resulted in 'an elevated error rate,' the Reddit Status website shows.
Robinhood, WeBull and other brokerages are down for the count, right now, thanks to extreme volatility in a wide variety of stocks across several markets. If we're looking at GameStop and AMC, we see massive market manipulation and calls from regulators to stop trading altogether. If we look at cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin, we see a bit more of the same.
This afternoon Reddit was down for a period of time starting at around 11:29 PST. On January 27, 2021, Reddit was the subject of some scrutiny thanks to the extreme nature of stock prices after recommendations and pushes from Reddit's various stock-watching communities. The push involved stocks like GameStop, BlackBerry, and the movie theater company AMC.
Reddit, arguably the most popular anonymous social network on the Internet, has long had some baffling and frustrating restrictions. One of the biggest issues is the lack of native image gallery support, forcing users to share either a single image directly on the site or to create a post linked to a third-party hosting site where the gallery was located. That changes with the launch of native image gallery support, a new opt-in feature.
Smartphones have put a lot of power into our hands, literally, but they have also exposed potential security and privacy violations in things we've been taking for granted on desktops. Things like asking permission to use certain hardware and software capabilities were almost an alien concept on desktop operating systems until Android and iOS showed how those can be easily abused, like how some mobile apps have been discovered to be reading clipboard content even when not in use.
A lot of social networking services have rolled out new or upgraded features to address the new living conditions that the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed on all of us. Many involve increasing group size limits or opening up new channels for communication. In that vein, popular social news aggregation network Reddit introduced a new Start Chatting feature that aimed to create a new and fun chatting experience with like-minded people. Unsurprisingly, the network pulled it out within just 24 hours after an angry mob of users and especially moderators gathered at its gates.
Reddit bills itself as the "front page of the Internet" but it's really more like the BBS and Internet forums of old. Someone makes a post and it gets discussed and commented on to death (or until a mod closes the thread) but all of this interaction happens asynchronously. Unless you sit all day in front of a Reddit page, waiting for someone to reply or post a comment. Now you no longer have to do that thanks to a new feature that matches you up with random Redditors with presumably the same interests as you.
Anonymous social media platform Reddit has rolled out a new major feature that enables anyone to poll other users on the site. With this new poll feature, communities (that don't disable the tool) will enable their members to ask other users for their opinions on topics and gather other information when relevant. Until now, users were forced to use third-party polling options for these tasks.
After six months of beta testing with major brands like Adobe, Spotify, and Method, Reddit rolled out "Trending Takeovers." This is an advertisement platform product in which the "trending today" system on Reddit can be "sponsored" by brands. They'll appear in links very similar to all other trending links, much like Google includes paying brands to appear in search results.
Reddit has disclosed what it believes may have been a 'campaign from Russia,' the social platform has announced. The discovery took place after Reddit became aware of a post containing leaked political documents from the United Kingdom. That post itself followed an alert Reddit said it received about suspicious accounts on its platform.
If you've attempted to get on your favorite subreddit at any point over the past hour, you've likely experienced issues ranging from pages only partially loading all the way to full error pages. The issue is widespread based on current reports, with users in many places complaining about an inability to access the website. Reddit has confirmed that it is looking into the matter.
Reddit users have had trouble accessing the service on mobile and desktop for most of Saturday morning, prompting an official response from the company: it is experiencing a partial outage across multiple aspects of its service. The outage, according to Reddit, is due to 'an incident' with Amazon Web Services that is impacting the social platform. It's unclear when the service will be fully restored.