Technology

Reddit suffers partial outage as blackout protest continues

reddit logo

UPDATE: Jun. 15, 2023, 2:20 p.m. EDT Reddit appeared to suffer a partial outage on Thursday and the company said it was working to restore functionality. Reports on Down Detector also dipped soon after they began to spike around 2 p.m. eastern time.

Reddit crashed for the second time this week on Thursday. The popular site went down amid a user-led blackout protest against a new company policy that effectively priced out lots of third-party apps.

The website Down Detector showed a spike in outage reports Thursday around 2 p.m. eastern time. Reddit’s homepage didn’t load when visited around that time. It showed only a blank page.

blank page with reddit.com in search bar
Not ideal for Reddit. Credit: Mashable

The site previously crashed on Monday for a relatively brief period of time.

These crashes come amid Reddit’s decision to drastically increase prices on API access, which priced out third-party app creators, including Apollo, the most popular. Reddit users organized a protest in response, turning lots of popular forums private, effectively shutting them down.

Reddit’s CEO recently downplayed the severity of the blackout and users, in response, redoubled their commitment.

Now the site is down for the second time in just one week.

This story is developing and will be updated…

Mashable