To say that Reddit caught the hatred of several online communities is an understatement. The social site has already experienced its first hit. As an indirect result of its insistence on keeping the new API pricing, the social network experienced a major outage.
Reddit's Major Blackout Amidst the Protest
Several thousand subreddits have participated in the protest by making the forums private in order to go dark. Reddit says that the protest was responsible for the major outage it had suffered, which was resolved around 1:26 P.M. EST.
Specifically, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt says that a massive number of subreddits going private caused the social networking site to become unstable. The outage affected both the websites for PC and mobile, as well as its native mobile sites, according to The Verge.
The problem was first identified around 10:58 A.M. EST. Reddit started to monitor the improvements across sites and expected that the issue would be resolved for the majority of users around 11:47 A.M. EST. It was fully resolved less than three hours after discovery.
Approximate;y 43,000 people reported that they experienced issues with Reddit at the peak of the outage. Even the live status report of the subreddits going dark was affected when the social networking site went out.
Over 7,000 subreddits have already gone dark or changed its setting to read-only. The number has risen significantly since June 11th, which is when some subreddits started going private even though the official blackout date was June 12th.
Read Also: Third-Party App Apollo is Shutting Down Due to Reddit's New API Pricing
Reddit's Current Status
Most of the forums that pledged to join the blackout have already gone dark or shifted to read-only mode with over 7,700 subreddits out of 8,299. The subreddit r/funny, which has the biggest member count of more than 40 million, has already gone private as well.
Almost all the groups that have more than 30 million members have gone private aside from r/Pics. As of right now, non-members will not be able to visit r/aww. r/gaming, r/Music, r/science, and r/todayilearned. It's undetermined when some of the forums will become public again.
As for the forums with more than 20 million members, 12 out of 18 subreddits have already gone private such as r/documentaries, r/art, r/gadgets, r/mildlyinteresting, r/sports, r/videos, r/DIY, r/food, r/NotTheOnion, r/EarthPorn and more, according to Reddark.
Initially, most of the groups were meant to only go dark for about 48 hours. However, many were disappointed with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's AMA. This resulted in the original limited-time protest becoming an indefinite blackout for a lot of subreddits.
One of the subreddits that have decided to prolong its protest is r/iPhone. All of the subreddits have one solution in mind, and that's for the company to take back its decision on its new API pricing. Otherwise, many of the subreddits will remain private while others might go beyond 48 hours.
Related: Several Reddit Communities Have Gone Dark, Some Doing So Indefinitely
