Reddit was down – the popular discussion platform had a huge outage

Reddit suffered a major outage on Wednesday, plunging its millions of devoted users into discussion darkness, with no place to drop their hot takes, memes, and AMA.

As of 5:21PM ET, the popular discussion platform appeared to be returning to normal.

Down Detector indicated that the worst of the outage reports were over, with its fever chart heading south.

Here’s everything that happened, though we still await details from Reddit on why the platform went down in the first place.

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Reddit appeared to be recovering by 4:13PM but the instability remains.

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Some pages, like the all-important Popular, remain blank.

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On the bright side, you can still peruse some of Reddit’s homepage.

Today, perhaps coincidentally, was also the day of US News Anchor Katie Couric’s first-ever Reddit AMA. It launched at 2PM ET, though we’re not pointing any fingers.

While the Reddit homepage appears to be sort of functional, Reddit’s own status checker is reporting degraded performance for most of its services. No word, yet, on what’s causing the issues. and, yes, “popular” remains offline.

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As of 4:36PM ET, Reddit’s homepage was failing again. Clearly, the issue, whatever it is, is significant enough that Reddit’s developers are likely playing a game of whackamole with critical failures.

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While the function for adding a new Reddit post appears, the system is still reporting multiple errors, and ultimately nothing gets posted. Guess all those anxious Reddit users will have to head over to Discord to post updates.

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As is usually the case, people on other social media platforms are enjoying a little schadenfreude over Reddit’s ongoing problems.

Even upstart social media platform Bluesky was paying attention though it, too, was suffering through a series of small outages on Wednesday. There is no indication they are connected. Bluesky keeps going down because of its sudden and almost unprecedented popularity.

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Some parts of Reddit appear to be performing normally except for this annoying error message banner that appears at the top of almost every page. It’s another sign that all is not well in Reddit Land.

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If Down Detector is any measure, Reddit appears to recovering. It’s obviously not out of the woods yet and Reddit’s status page has yet to show an update, but all signs point to an imminent return to normal Reddit up- and down-voting.

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Reddit’s Popular section remains mostly down and while the other subreddits are live, Reddit’s response time when you click on any of them is quite slow. This is still not the Reddit you know and love.

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Perhaps we spoke too soon. As of 5:00PM ET, Reddit’s homepage was again mostly empty. The error message at the top is now the most interesting thing to read. Reddit has not updated its status report since 3:38PM ET.

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Reddit’s last public comment on the outage was on X (formerly Twitter) in response to someone asking if Reddit was down. They posted, “We’re working on it.”

In the first sign of truly good news, Reddit’s crucial Popular subreddit returned, though not without the big, red error bar. We, however, consider this progress. Full Reddit and posting should be back in no time and then we can all get back to laughing at silly road and store signs and cats telling us ironically to “hang in there.”

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The platform is healing. From the looks of things, Reddit is returning to form. It’s still a bit slow and there are those occasional big, red issue bars but we’re seeing more and more complete pages without that blemish. Some of them are even loading quickly.

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Hold on a second. Just as Reddit appeared to be truly recovering, we saw a new and far more dire message when we tried to access Reddit.com

A CDN going down or being unable to communicate with servers is far more serious and could indicate some kind of backbone outage. Reddit is a big system and probably needs a lot of back-end server support to keep delivering all those hot memes. Some part of that infrastructure could be down.

Our colleagues over at Tom’s Guide got this statement from Reddit: “The teams are working on it but we don’t have a timeline to share.”

(Image credit: Future)