Reddit was down, again

Reddit is well-known as the social media app people go to for everything from raw opinions to brutal trolling, but unfortunately, none of that was available to many users for approximately 30 minutes today because the service suffered an outage. Importantly, this is the second time in a 24-hour window that Reddit went down, following a massive service interruption yesterday.

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The popular social media platform was inaccessible for many of us on the Android Police team. Popular outage monitoring website, Downdetector, also noticed a spike in reports related to Reddit starting at around 9:50 am EST on Thursday. Downdetector peaked at a whopping 68,415 user reports about Reddit, surpassing the ~40,000 reports from Wednesday. This could mean the impact of this disruption was far more widespread.

However, Reddit’s own platform status monitoring tool was rather late to report the outage, simply stating that all systems were operating normally for a long time. However, Reddit Status posted to X (formerly Twitter) about this outage, confirming that a fix is underway. Unlike yesterday’s outage which showed users an error message, today’s simply prevented the website from loading in your browser, delivering HTTP Error 500 instead, saying the page isn’t working. The Reddit app for Android and iOS seemed to be operational, but loading speeds took a hit.

A string of interruptions isn’t a good look

Twice in one week is even worse

While we wait for more details about the cause of today’s interruption, its worth noting the disruption on Wednesday took four hours to fix. It was also the fourth performance-related issue flagged since September 19, so today’s issue is the fifth in the past month-long period – a worrying stat for Reddit. That said, the remedial action was swifter today, with users in the US seeing the slow loading and a red error message banner on the web soon after the status dashboard mentioned repairs were underway. At 8:20 AM PST, Reddit said it resumed normal operation. The same information was subsequently posted to X as well.

Frequent outages dent the brand image of web titans, and the effect only compounds at the scale Reddit operates at. We hope the site engineers don’t go for a trifecta in the same month, at least. Importantly, the company hasn’t disclosed what caused the outage on Thursday.