Is Reddit down? user outage reports surge across US - Newsweek
Reddit appears to be mostly back online following a spike in outage reports, however, a small number of users are still reporting issues.
Reddit said it is investigating after users reported widespread outages overnight, with some users having issues logging onto the site and others experiencing problems reading or writing posts.
A surge in outage reports began shortly before midnight ET Sunday, according to the website Downdetector, peaking about 1.30 a.m. Monday.
"We are currently experienc[ing] a performance degradation of our service," Reddit posted on X, formerly Twitter, at 4.12 a.m. ET. "We are working to fix the problem."
The vast majority of issues reported were related to Reddit's website, while the app appeared to be working as normal. Many trying to access the site were met with the error message "upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection failure."
As of 5:50 a.m. ET, service appeared to be coming back online with Downdetector noting: "User reports indicate no current problems at Reddit." However, there was a fresh spike in error reports submitted to Downdetector at 06:55 a.m. ET.
Users of the social news site took to X to complain, "Reddit is down, and I'm suddenly reminded of how fragile my daily scrolling routine is," said @shidika_ubr, while another user @obscurethingy added, "existential crisis because reddit is down..."
Reddit has a history of occasional technical issues, particularly during high-traffic events. Two of the most significant outages occurred in March and August 2023, when the platform was down for several hours each time.
The most recent outage before Monday was August 28, when thousands of Reddit users were met by error messages, "We have encountered an error. Please try again later" and "We were unable to load the content for this page." Less than an hour after this issue, access to the website and app were restored.
The platform, which has over 100,000 active communities and over 91 million unique users on a daily basis, was also hacked in 2023, when it was targeted by a sophisticated phishing attack, in which cybercriminals deceived an employee into providing their login credentials and two-factor authentication tokens.
This breach allowed the attackers to gain unauthorized access to internal documents, code, and certain unidentified business systems. The hackers behind the attack, the BlackCat ransomware group, demanded $4.5 million and called for Reddit to reverse its recent API price changes.
Newsweek has contacted Reddit via email for comment.
