Reddit is DOWN: Website hit with outage as 6,5000 forums ‘go dark’ in user protest

Reddit has been hit with a worldwide outage impacting hundreds of thousands of users as forums ‘go dark’ to protest the website’s increased developer fees.

Issues appeared around 10 am ET and are affecting the website and app.

The social news website went down while more than 6,500 subreddits went dark in one of the largest user-driven protests due to new developer fees.

Some of the largest communities on the site have been set to private and will remain for the next 48 hours. 

However, it is unclear if the outage is related to ‘Blackout Day.’ 

Users have flocked to Twitter to inquire about a possible outage hitting Reddit, with one tweeting: ‘Nice to see even Reddit itself getting in on the Reddit Blackout today.’

Reddit has been hit with a worldwide outage impacting hundreds of thousands of users

The massive protest is in response to Reddit announcing it would charge access to its application programming interface (API) for third parties with ‘additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.’

And the increased pricing is set to hit on July 1.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman addressed users’ ‘frustrations’ in a Friday post to the site, laying out how the changes will work.

‘Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user/month for a typical Reddit third-party app),’ Hoffman wrote.

He continued: ‘Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.’

While Hoffman is looking out for the future of Reddit, the move could force some app developers to shut down. 

Christian Selig, the developer of Reddit client app Apollo, said the increased pricing new pricing would cost him as much as $20 million per year, Variety reports.

He continued explaining that this means Apollo plans to stop operations on June 30. 

The social news website went down while more than 6,500 subreddits went dark in one of the largest user-driven protests due to new developer fees

Monday’s outage, however, is plaguing users worldwide.

DownDetector, a website that monitors online outages, showed more than 40,000 issues reports in the US at 10:41 am ET.

Other parts of the world, like the UK, Europe and Asia, are also experiencing issues with the platform.  

However, Reddit has been experiencing outages nearly every day in the last few weeks – the most recent was Sunday and before that was June 7.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk