All outages
2023-06-12
Reddit goes down during the June 2023 blackout as thousands of subreddits go private
- Date
- 2023-06-12
- Duration
- ~2 hours of disruption
- Root cause
- A mass protest over the new third-party API pricing pushed thousands of subreddits private at roughly the same time. Reddit said the sudden, simultaneous shift of so many large communities to private created stability problems the platform was not provisioned for.
- Services affected
- Front page and post loading; logged-in browsing across web and apps
Impact
On June 12, 2023, hours into the coordinated blackout, Reddit's front page began returning empty posts with a 'Something went wrong. Just don't panic.' message and users could not load content. Reddit attributed the instability to the expected load of a significant number of subreddits flipping to private simultaneously. The site resumed normal function roughly two hours after the first outage reports.