What happened
On August 29, 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to host a Reddit Ask Me Anything, fielding questions in r/IAmA during his re-election campaign. The session drew an overwhelming surge of traffic: within fifteen minutes the thread had nearly 2,000 comments, and the influx repeatedly knocked parts of the site offline, leaving users with error messages as they tried to log in or refresh. Reports at the time described well over 200,000 simultaneous visitors, eclipsing Reddit's previous concurrent-user records.
Obama personally answered about ten of the more than 10,000 questions submitted before leaving roughly half an hour later. The AMA was a watershed moment that validated Reddit as a destination for mainstream political figures and demonstrated the raw scale of attention the platform could command. It also exposed the limits of Reddit's infrastructure under peak load, and it elevated the AMA format into one of the platform's signature products, paving the way for a steady stream of high-profile guests in the years that followed.