Reddit Experiences Widespread Outages, Affecting Millions of Users
Popular social media platform Reddit faced significant disruptions on Thursday and Friday evening, leaving millions of users unable to access the site. The most recent outage, occurring on Friday, lasted approximately two hours and primarily affected desktop users who encountered error pages when attempting to log in.
Reports indicated that some users could still access the site through incognito mode or mobile devices, albeit with slower loading times. The issues affected both logged-in and logged-out experiences.
Reddit’s status page acknowledged the problem at 7:58 PM ET, reporting an elevated level of errors and announcing an ongoing investigation. By 8:40 PM ET, the company had identified the root cause and began implementing a fix. The incident was officially declared resolved at 9:47 PM ET.
The scale of the outage was evident on Downdetector, a website that tracks online service disruptions. The platform recorded a substantial spike in outage reports, peaking at around 80,000. This surge began shortly after 7:30 PM ET and showed a significant decline by 9 PM ET.
This recent disruption follows on the heels of another incident just a day prior. On Thursday, Reddit experienced what NetBlocks described as “international outages,” though the impact was not uniform across all users.
As of February 21st, Reddit has confirmed that the incident has been fully resolved. The company has not provided immediate comment on the cause of the outages or any potential long-term impacts.
These back-to-back disruptions highlight the challenges faced by major online platforms in maintaining consistent service for their vast user bases. As Reddit continues to grow in popularity, ensuring robust infrastructure and quick response times to technical issues will be crucial for user satisfaction and retention.
