More than 27,000 users of the social media platform submitted issues with using the site to Down Detector, a website that provides realtime overview of issues and outages with internet services.
Although the site appeared to be slowly coming back roughly 40 minutes later, some users were still reporting partial outages or other issues.
“504 Gateway Timeout: The gateway has timed out,” one user reported.
According to Reddit Status, the social media platform announced at 5:18 p.m. ET that the website has been “experiencing an elevated level of errors and are currently looking into the issue.”
“I’m so mad that reddit is down, I’m in the middle of an argument and have great response planned in my head #redditdown,” Twitter user @megisanoob tweeted.
“So when youtube and reddit goes down, everyone goes on twitter. what happens when twitter goes down?” user @yoonpatrick3 tweeted.
Two hours later, around 7 p.m. ET, the number of Reddit user problem reports significantly dropped off, implying that the website was likely back to operating as usual.
According to Down Detector, 51 percent of the issues reported were related to Reddit’s webpage, 45 percent to its app and 2 percent to login functions.
Newsweek reached out to Reddit for additional information. This article will be updated with any response.
The temporary site failures on Wednesday comes weeks after the website announced a brand new feature on April 29 called “Start Chatting,” which lets users join randomly generated chat rooms about a specific subreddit. One day after its introduction, Reddit’s Vice President of Product and Community Alex Le said the feature had been “rolled back 100%” because it was made with “several errors.”
Reddit, an American social news aggregation, web content rating and discussion website, was founded by Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz on June 23, 2005 in Medford, Massachusetts.
Ohanian—who was only 23 when he co-founded the website—has been labeled “the mayor of the internet” by Forbes over his ongoing efforts to promote internet freedom and protect net neutrality. Now 37, Ohanian was recently chosen to deliver the commencement speech at The Johns Hopkins University. He will be the youngest person to ever deliver that speech and the only individual to have done it amid a global pandemic.
“Been working on my speech for a little while now, adapting it to the circumstances we’re now facing,” Ohanian tweeted recently. “Though I wish we could celebrate your achievement in person, I’m grateful to join your graduation exercises digitally.”
