BREAKING: REDDIT IS DOWN

Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I'll just lock it for now.

"Ok guys, if we take the site down they can't have a blackout: It's brilliant!"

-Spez probably

We did it, reddit!
...wait, fuck. Lemmy!
- Thanks for your good punctuation.
- we are reddit in some ways
- Lemmy for president!!
  Who the fuck is Lemmy?
They're likely changing the mod structure during the blackout. A lot of low-paid, repurposed bangladeshi click-farm mods coming in.
- Reddit? Paying mods? As if.
  They've gone 15 years not paying mods for their work. They're not about to start now, especially if they're concerned about costs.
- That would not surprise me in the least.
- Id bet their brand new API has a few horrible bugs or the system charging accounts is too slow for the real world.
lmao!
Check. and. mate.
- Google en peasant
  I wonder if anarchychess has a community yet?
Big brain move

I've used rif and old.reddit respectively for so long that I really had no idea how much of a shitshow the ui had turned in too until I checked it out through the official app and new layout style in browser.

No fucking thank you, take your glitter shit and constant ad pushing and jump off a cliff.

The first ad that popped was a promoted post for machine gun kelly. I listen to grindcore, crossover, metal, etc.. That sealed its fate in my eyes.

I actually prefer when the ads are targeted but wrong. It shows me they don't know me as well as they could. Also if I'm not interested they aren't distracting
- I used the official app but I have ADHD, which is basically targeted ad kryptonite. By the time they target something to me, I've moved on.
Same here. I've been using old.reddit with RES and apollo for so long that I forgot reddit even had ads until I tried the official app.
- Same, RiF + old. FTW TBH, really liking Lemmy ❤️
Yeah. I don't mind ads if I'm getting content for free, but at least know your audience. I feel like especially the hegetsus spam was wildly misplaced on Reddit.
There was some kind of cookie consent popup on old.reddit.com and it said "go to the new reddit to set preferences" or something like that and i clicked it without reading properly and got sent to new reddit.
What a shit website.... I will never use new reddit. Get fucked spez
for years companies have been trying for “targeted ads” but in rare occasions I see ads, they’re terribly off the mark, like you have mentioned
- Companies have been trying and succeeding with targeted ads*
  There's a reason a bunch of the biggest tech companies in the world's main revenue is these ads, they absolutely work unfortunately.
Not related at all, but hear me out...lemmy needs a grind/extreme music community
I don't even think most of their ads gets interacted often. The small amount of people who are using the official reddit app probably have gotten used to it now so will just wait this blackout out.
- I think more people use the official app than you might think. I initially thought everyone was in unanimous outrage, but many just don’t care. I don’t understand how some people know about ad-free third party apps and still use the official one.
- Using the official app for a given site/service is usually a good heuristic. Just not in this case, IMO.
Same. "new" reddit makes me want to barf. So does the official app.

Reddit really trying to copy lemmy now

Yeah, seems like a bunch of instances getting the ol' death hug right now
Will save this when there's c/AngryUpvote opens lol

THE SYSTEM... IS DOWN THE SYSTEM... IS DOWN

Aggressive techno noises

Strong Bad at his finest
- The Telltale series is leaving Steam soon. I don't think there's a delist date, but their license is expiring soon. I bought and gifted three copies already.
The Cheat is grounded!
one of the few ringtones i still keep on my phone

I think it's ridiculous that it's actually the sub blackout that killed Reddit today. How can this happen?

See TheVerge: "Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout"

Reddit has long survived with the help of pornography makers. Reddit does not face a quick death.

Sorry, rewriting it, buttons are a bit wonky tonight.
They're removing NSFW content from the API, and someone yesterday posted about a new lemmy server dedicate to NSFW, if they can take it away from reddit, it will die for sure, tho it's probably what they want, investors apparently don't like that kind of content.
Makers and consumers. At one point an Admin, I think it was Alexis or Yashan, said straight up like 50% of reddit is porn. That was years ago though, and I'm sure they've done what they could to mitigate that.
- porn doesn't sit well with advertisers, so of course they would
🎼 The Internet is for porn 🎶

What is this reddit? i only know lemmy ;)

Good to know that Reddit can be killed for an entire afternoon any time the community wants by coordinating the use of basic site functions.

I hope the major subs stay dark. The only thing keeping reddit afloat is moderators. Without tools the mods would need full time paid positions which is never going to happen. I'd like to see them all burn. Its become a shit show of adds and bots now anyway. Good riddance. I wish someone would incorporate freenets web of trust system to some type of decentralized app like this.

Could they not replace the mods? In the end, don’t they own the subreddits? Who owns the intellectual property?
- They'd have to find people as enthusiastic. Quality would likely drop.
- In a lot of ways we do. If I choose to delete my profile, there goes a ton of posts from one sub.

i like how they said that the outage anticipated and expected yet, they didn't prevent it only to try to fix it once it happened. totally healthy company behavior 👌

Chances Reddit did this on purpose to hide the content blackout?

Reddit hides partial blackout by going full blackout lmao
- Sounds silly, but I'm guessing they don't want the dip in usage on some reports they have to show to stakeholders, and can instead write it off as server issues.
- Galaxy brain
- Reddit SysAdmin can protest too, no?
u/Spez will just put the blame on Christian again (Apollo's dev).
But on a little more serious note, I doubt this is on purpose. This would look really bad for the credibility of the platform, there is a LOT of users that just want to keep doomscrolling Reddit and in all honesty don't give a spez(fuck) about what's going on with the protests.
But... if this is on purpose...
Strange decision to say the least.
- u/Spez will just put the blame on Christian again (Apollo’s dev).
  100%.. "malicious code in a 3rd party app led effectively to a DDOS attack on reddit.. this is why we must close the API to only allow select approved apps"
- This would look really bad for the credibility of the platform
  From what I've been following, they haven't been too concerned about this since at least a few weeks ago
It just makes the blackout look more successful honestly. Pretty dumb of them but they haven't been making great decisions lately.
- I don't know. My best bet is that it's a happy coincidence for them. It's probably just an actual accidental outage, but it can be spun in a few different ways. Given their push for an IPO, I wouldn't be surprised if this is an excuse for lower traffic numbers. "Hey, look, these guys all went to protest but there was an outage. Nothing correlates the numbers. Now that we're back up on XYZ date, everything is returning to normal! It was no big deal!"
  If it actually turns out to be something more nefarious, I can't say I'd be surprised, but I sincerely hope that isn't the case.
- Anyone feel like Spez is shooting out the lights on his way out?
My money is on a DDoS attack. DDoS attacks are 100% going to happen after what Spez pulled.
- That's what I thought first because their infrastructure seems to be shit.
Probably used the lower traffic as an opportunity to perform "maintenance".
- The maintenance in this case is damage control. They spent the time deleting a hell of lot of comments from all over the place.
  They definitely don't want their investors to know what's happening.
Well a 5xx response wont get delisted from Google as fast as a 403, so there's that possibility.
- If you hit a private sub you still get a 200 😉
that would be disgusting, but i would not be surprised at this point :/
Probably better than average.
Even more reason the blackout needs to last more than 48 hrs.
Oh no! I hope they don't do this indefinitely! It would totally defeat the purpose of them going dark in the first place... ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> We're aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.
- I'm 99% sure those are automated, so it really doesn't say anything.
Would be the perfect time for critical server updates that require downtime anyway ;)
that's just every other tuesday, not like reddit is known for immense stability

The Verge article:

“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.

So... According to Reddit the blackout is the culprit, I guess?

So either it's just an outage and they're faulting the blackout, or the blackout is actually the culprit. Either way I hope this works. However, I'm still not going back to Reddit even if they fix and reverse everything.

Do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by idiocy. It is entirely plausible that their algorithm couldn't handle the most popular subreddits going dark all at once. They likely hard-relegated so many other subs that would appear on r/popular or r/all to lower priority and thus when the higher priority subs disappeared, it couldn't change priorities and cause the crash.
- This is absolutely the most likely scenario.
I wonder if it's bots or something trying to access the now dark subreddits. Essentially causing a DDOS.
- well if i made a bot, hmm, yeah that could cause it lol. Like if i tell it "go in every 30 minutes & steal the top 20 posts", and it's down, i'd just say "retry till u get it, idc if u DoS that shit" and well if many ppl do it, it's a free DDoS courtesy of robotland
When a major sub goes private, that's an awful lot of posts and comments that they have to hide from the rest of the internet. I'm not surprised there's some excess load on their systems with lots of them doing it at once.
That's going to be the excuse, huh
"We have a duty to keep the site running"
- and when their plot is discovered
  "some sacrifices must be made, we killed it so we could keep it alive!"

its a reddit psyop so you go and check and bump the numbers up. stay woke.

kek idk, i tried to go in to check which of my fave subs were private and it was ded, and i remembered "ah right i was supposed to not go in today" and closed the app. this happened a few times. i use it more as a reminder not to visit.
reminder that most ppl leave in the first 3-5 seconds if a page doesn't load fast enough, ppl have very short attention spans statistically. if it's a "psyop" it's a pretty bad one cuz they will lose a shitton of ad views this way.
- 5d chess friend, they're operating on levels we can't even comprehend. give me a few hours and I'll think of some bullshit to explain it.

This was beautiful and totally unsurprising.

While I was reading through this, I had a pop-up saying “report created”. I didn’t press anything to report; I only gave upvotes. So, apologies to who/what was reported. 😖

same thing happened to me on another post! Not sure what I clicked...

don't worry they will complain ApolloApp for this anyway

"It was u/christianselig's fault for not paying us $20 million uwu"

But do we know why it was down? If it was something like a ddos (or claimed to be) this could be used to vilify the protestors.

Our usage stats show that we have record low numbers of people using the site and at the same time we have too many people using the site.
If they are being completely honest, my guess is that the page that loads when a sub is private comes from a server that doesn’t typically get much load.
Then everything went private and suddenly that server was hugged to death.
- This makes sense to me. I only came over to Lemmy because of the reddit API drama, and I'm pretty impressed with it so far! I'd love for it to grow, so I hope this is a death knell or sign of things to come for Reddit.

It's my fault apparently

Always hated that image on the error page. Blaming the user when they are the ones that fucked up. Server errors are never the users fault
- I think it's pretty funny and I'm sure it's just a joke. It's hardly actually blaming users, imo.

If you can't beat 'em... Fuck 'em!

Some possibilities:

Some fool thinks it's a good idea to DDoS Reddit today to make a point.
Some Reddit admin thinks it's a good idea to take it offline deliberately to make a point.
The general public are hugging it to death out of curiosity about the protest.
Unrelated outage. Outages happen, sometimes even on the same day as other things.

Or they took it offline to "hide" all the blacked out subreddits. Some had images about the third party apps as their only post, which was on the front page. By going offline it makes it seem like more of a technical issue rather than a protest.
Using Occam's Razor, I'd bet on the last option.
- Or the third.
- You'd be right. https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
I’d guess that with so many top subs going dark, the mixing algorithm needs to dig deeper and it’s not tuned for that. These algorithms are hard to get right at Reddit’s scale.
As an example to populate the frontpage or /r/all it might would need to scan all posts from the private subs before even getting a sizeable amount of candidate posts from the public ones to rank. Then the public subs won’t be in cache nor will caching help as much on those long tail subreddits. Not being in cache means more hits to the DB and that’s going to affect nearly all requests to Reddit.
- Slow down there Alex Jones...
- r/conspiracy licking their lips right now.
- @nodsocket It's a special de-blackoutisation operation through their own blackout.
  @fubo
It could be that their infrastructure is set up to optimize showing data on the typically most popular subreddits.

Can I just say, I'm so happy that everybody banded together against them. Like a bunch of strangers on the internet grouping together to tell them, "No, you will not"

me too man, me too. such a warming feeling. fuck spez. I think it's amazing we're all coming together against this
I look forward to what else the community and developers will do while saying "no"
- Honestly, lemmy is not bad, taking a little getting used to but there's so many communities being created I wouldn't be surprised if see a large migration over the next few months. It seems quite a few people have already made up their minds

how long was it? i heard about it earlier but when i checked it worked fine

About an hour.
Webpage is still down for me - ironically Boost for Reddit seems to work fine

Subreddit mods win. Fatality.

Eat shit Pez.

uwu

we did it reddit

We did it ~~Reddit~~ Lemmy

I'm guessing hundreds of thousands of uninformed users are getting blocked from subreddits and are constantly retrying.

They could also be having to check lots of people against the lists of who is allowed in what private subs. Which could in turn cause problems if the code there assumes that usually people are allowed in the private subs they visit and relies on that to be fast.
Not sure that there were any private subs with tens of millions of disallowed subscribers before this morning.
More likely bots than people if they're hitting it that hard
- That'd be an interesting twist.

Its been having issues for days. I discovered as much while deleting all my old post and comments.

Appears to be up for me.

That's what she said!
- GOT EM! HA!

Reddit free tier usage reached

drink a verification can of {product placement} to continue

Maybe they just ran out of money and their hosting provider shut them down? Reddit was so desperate with these API fees

And "unprofitable" too.
- Nothing more hilarious than /u/spez saying the company is unprofitable right before IPOing
It's not like they were aware that Google/Amazon gives them insights on how to spend less on hosting costs

seems unlikely (to me) that this would be intentional from reddit's side. You'd think they would be VERY interested to see how this really impacts site traffic and how much "protest" they can absorb before taking administrative action against mods/subreddits.

Given the degree of ... social awareness... They've displayed, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if someone at Reddit simply thought "this is the perfect time for maintenance!" and they ran with it 😂
- I mean, it kinda is, usage must have dropped significantly
It creates a data hole so investors can't see the impact?
- Investors would be more upset about the downtime, it's not like investors wouldn't be aware of the drama.
  Probably a ddos.
- That's plausible. But while reddit may be that dumb, investors sure aren't.

It's back up again... DANG!

Edit: And DOWN again lmao

I'm not seeing it..
I wouldn't be surprised if it's getting DDoS'd to enforce a site-wide blackout or something, either that or they're performing maintenance while nobody's around
Still down for me, probably just got lucky on a refresh

aww ya!

lmao, its not like the site is being overloaded right now as half the site is private, they are doing this shit on purpose

even reddit is protesting it's own shit CEO

Is it possible someone launched a DDoS attack against Reddit?

My first thought too.

Lol, imagine your site crashing during it's lowest utilization in years.

I mean, if I was a reddit infra engineer (and this is a long shot because I'm not), I would definitely use the "blackout day(s)" for some heavy maintenance or experiments that normally are too scary to do on a high loaded live server.

(edit: spelling)

Webdev here. When I am blessed with a "we are closed" day on some clients' websites, I drop everything else so I can get some database cleanup in.

This is one of the things I've always hated about Reddit.

No, Reddit, this isn't my fault. You broke because you're a shitty website held together by chewing gum and prayers. It isn't cute when you blame users for your own shortcomings. You've been like this since the beginning and it hasn't gotten better. Fuck off.

It’s funny that it works normally on Apollo for me 😎

Oh no

Anyway

Okay my theory:

Idk about other countries but here Reddit is pretty much the only big social media platform that isn‘t overrun by normies and boomers. So people from my country using reddit are either relatively young people that are somewhat chronically online or people or techies.

Now the reddit blackout generated a lot of attention and all the normies and boomers are like „wtf is a reddit“ and go to check it out. So that just ddos‘d reddit.

I have zero evidence for my theory but I really like it.

LMFAO

Oh the site is like DOWN down

Reddit probably be like "we had sooooo many users these days that our servers went out. But we cannot provide any numbers, we lost all the server data"

Love to see it. Total meltdown, lol

Of course it's Apollo's fault

Looks like i'm watching a shit ton of youtube today instead of spending my work day on reddit. any good channel recs?

Technology connections!
- Yes
Hang out here? Hopefully we can get this place going...
But also "The Tim Traveller" is a good binge for Tom Scott-esque videos
Why, Primitive Technology, of course!

According to redditstatus.com: “Website failing to load. Identified - We're aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.”

Maybe the code generating the posts list doesn't handle having so many private communities

Must have ran out money. Oh well.

Where is this from? It says „outages reported“, so it is random people’s opinions? Maybe people believe Reddit is down because their frontpage is empty now?

Aah, the ol' 'you are not firing me, I quit!'

Was curious what was happening, was using libreddit and figured they were just being bogged down, but my mobile app doesn't work either. Also anyone know why the upvotes on this post are fluctuating between <10, ~20, 150, 400, etc.? Are they upvote numbers for different instances?

I believe the upvotes you see on lemmy are stored on your local instance. The score updates as the home instance to the post reports incoming votes.

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

I posted somewhere that it's taken down Kbin and Hacker News too.

https://news.ycombinator.com gone.

Hackernews is back up and has a thread with more context (speculation?) On the reddit outage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294244. Cloudflare having issues is pretty interesting though.
I have to admit, among the set of [reddit, Lemmy], I did not predict that the one expecting the more serious availability issues today would be reddit.

7:40am Pacific Time - People just woke up to a shitstorm. LOL

Check at 6:00am PCT and All page was mostly whitepopletwitter and gaming. It in no way looked like your typical day of popular /all on the home page.
- Im surprised r/conservative hasn't hit the front page yet