Reddit suffers a major outage amid ‘dark’ protest – Times of India

Thousands of Reddit communities have gone on a 48-hour protest, shutting their doors to outsiders, and ironically, the platform suffered a “major outage” at the same time.
At first, Reddit’s Status page showed everything was running fine, including the website. But then users began reporting that they couldn’t load the Reddit.com homepage. It became evident that something was wrong. The status page was updated to acknowledge that the site was down, and it took a few hours to get the platform up and running again.
During the outage, around 43,000 users reported problems on DownDetector, but the number of reports has decreased significantly. Additionally, a website that is monitoring the number of private subreddits on a Twitch stream was also affected by the outage, but it has since been restored.
“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” a Reddit spokesperson said.
Over 7,000 subreddits have participated in the protest against Reddit’s new API pricing by either going private or read-only. Some popular subreddits, such as r/todayilearned, r/funny, and r/gaming, have joined the strike. Others, like r/iPhone and r/unexpected, have shut their doors.
Christian Selig, the creator of Apollo for Reddit, has announced that the app would be shut down later this month as it may cost over $20 million a year to simply operate the app. Some accessibility apps may have to close down, but Reddit said they would be exempted.
Subreddit moderators are protesting to show the strength of numbers. If many subreddits go private, it will pressure Reddit to take action. Moderators oppose the change, feeling it undermines their role and may even cause them to stop moderating. The blackout may continue until Reddit changes its policies, meaning some communities will not be accessible until the policy is reversed.