Yesterday we saw the iPhone subreddit kick off the planned protest early that wants Reddit to reconsider its API changes. Today thousands of subreddits have also gone dark, joining the cause. In what may be related to the number of non-functional subreddits, it appears Reddit’s whole platform is now down.
Update 8:50 am PT: We’re seeing Reddit back up – that is for the subreddits and pages that haven’t gone dark for the protest. Reports of the downtime have also dropped on Down Detector.
As we reported over the weekend, over 4,000 subreddits with hundreds of millions of subscribers in total have gone dark today. Some have committed to doing a 48-hour blackout, while some like the iPhone subreddit have vowed to shut down indefinitely in protest of the API changes that will kill off most third-party apps by the end of June.
When heading to Reddit’s website this morning, nothing is loading with the top section showing the message “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.”
Even on the “Popular” landing page, nothing loads. At the time of writing, Down Detector has seen over 40,000 reports of the Reddit issues. But it’s a bit tricky to know how much of it is from the planned protest and how much is server or other technical issues at Reddit.
Along with trouble loading the main landing pages of Reddit’s website, “Page not found” errors like this are showing when trying to navigate to specific subreddits:
As a refresher, here’s some background on what’s happened over the last few weeks:
At the end of May, we heard specifics about Reddit’s updated API when Apollo developer Christian Selig shared that the company was asking for $20 million per year to keep his app going.
Top comment by Raymond Chuang
It didn't help that Reddit CEO Steve Huffman was woefully unhelpful in the Ask Me Anything (AMA) chat he did just recently, which angered even more users. Now you really wonder was Reddit being forced to do this because of pressure from investment companies with a stake in Advance Publications, the current owner of Reddit?
Last week, as the news spread and Reddit moderators considered the company’s unreasonable decisions and what to do, hundreds of subreddits (now over 7,800) planned a protest to start on June 12 that will see much of the website do dark.
On June 8, Christian Selig officially announced he would have to shut down Apollo at the end of June. The next day Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hosted what turned out to be a disastrous AMA on the platform.
That led some like the iPhone subreddit to start their protest early with the majority of those participating starting this morning.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on the situation.
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