Reddit, one of the web’s most popular time-wasting sites, went down for nearly two hours on Wednesday afternoon, leaving tens of thousands of people unable to access their favorite subreddits.
According to Down Detector, the Reddit outage began around 1:30 p.m. PT and affected users worldwide, with both the website and the site’s app not working. Nearly 20,000 people reported issues with the site on Down Detector. Users complained that the site was giving them a 503 error page or just not loading at all.
After about two hours, the site came back online just after 3:30 p.m. PT. It’s still not clear what caused the outage. Reddit updated its official status page to say that “the incident has been resolved” at 3:47 p.m. PT.
An earlier update posted to the status page at 1:27 p.m. said that the site was experiencing “elevated errors.”
“We are currently investigating this issue,” the page read, adding that there was not much more information at that time.
We’ve reached out to Reddit to see if they had any updates on the two-hour outage. We’ll update this story with the latest information as soon as we hear back.
If Reddit goes down again and you’re really hankering for a glimpse of it, the Reddit Archive — as you might imagine — keeps an archive of the front page of Reddit. Here’s what Reddit looked like before it went down:
Reddit has gone down a number of times over the past few months. The site experienced errors on Tuesday, and went down at the end of August. Reddit’s desktop site also went down for several hours in July.
As is typically the case when a major site or social network is down, Reddit users joked about the outage on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/MilkSteaknJelly/status/1174439314886774784
I'm only here because reddit is down. #redditdown
— Mr. Pennybags (@xPennybagsx) September 18, 2019
Why am I this way? #redditdown pic.twitter.com/8fLVs7jkxn
— Mr. Pennybags (@xPennybagsx) September 18, 2019
Major outages are the norm for the world’s most popular social media sites — it’s tough to keep your servers up when they’re constantly being bombarded by millions (or billions) of users. Instagram and Snapchat both went down at the same time earlier in September, following a separate outage that left Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offline for nearly 12 hours.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
