Reddit Struggles with Outage and Backlash as Subreddits Go Dark in Protest

Reddit suffered multiple problems on Monday, including a substantial outage that coincided with a major blackout by numerous subreddits in opposition to the platform's new API pricing conditions.

Tim Rathschmidt, a Reddit business representative, said several subreddits "shifting to private caused some expected stability issues," and the company was addressing the foreseen matter, according to The Verge.

Reddit had a "major outage" early on Monday morning that affected its desktop and mobile websites and its native mobile applications at 10:58 a.m. ET, the firm sent a statement acknowledging the content loading difficulties and pledging to fix them quickly.

During the height of the problems, an estimated 45,000 user complaints deluded Downdetector; however, the number of reports has since sharply declined.

The Reddit outage issue was fixed at 1:28 p.m. ET, according to Engadget.

The anticipated Reddit blackout was arranged last week and began on June 12, as planned. Although Reddit was aware of the planned protests, which included some 7,000 subreddits, the website still experienced an outage.

The Reason of The Protest

The protest came from subreddit moderators' heavy use of third-party applications to administer and personalize their communities. The API pricing hike, however, poses the risk of wiping out a sizable number of these applications, according to Uproxx.

In April, Reddit stated that it would charge third-party developers for API access, which is used in many applications, including moderation tools.

The developers of third-party clients, which many Redditors prefer over the company's website or applications, have suffered due to the API changes, even if the main objective of the changes may have been businesses scraping Reddit for information to train language learning models.

Due to the modifications to the API, among the most well-known third-party clients, Apollo will discontinue operations at the end of this month. Reddit founder Christian Selig stated that keeping Apollo running as it is will cost him $20 million a year. On June 30, RIF, a popular third-party Reddit software, will also cease.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman justified the API modifications in an AMA session before the subreddit shutdown by highlighting the platform's profitability target. Huffman noted that the platform "needs to be a self-sustaining business," hence, the company "can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use."

Moreover, he said that Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync would terminate operations before the new costs took effect since their companies' pricing structures were incompatible.