All AMAs
2012-08-29
President Obama's r/IAmA AMA crashes Reddit
Barack Obama — 44th President of the United States (during 2012 re-election campaign)
- Guest
- Barack Obama
- Role
- 44th President of the United States (during 2012 re-election campaign)
- Date
- 2012-08-29
- Subreddit
- r/IAmA
- Outcome
- A landmark moment that legitimized Reddit AMAs as a mainstream political venue; the traffic surge briefly crashed the site.
What happened
On August 29, 2012, President Barack Obama hosted a roughly one-hour Reddit AMA under the username PresidentObama, taking questions on internet freedom, the space program, Afghanistan and White House beer. Traffic spiked far past Reddit's prior records, pushing the site into intermittent outages and read-only mode.