Millions of Reddit users hit with 2-hour outage during ‘Blackout Day’

Reddit has been hit with a worldwide outage impacting millions of users as forums ‘go dark’ to protest the website’s increased developer fees.

Issues with problems on the website and app surfaced on DownDetector, a site that monitors online outages, at 10:25 am ET – but reports dissipated about two hours later.

It is unclear why Reddit was down Monday, but it occurred when more than 7,000 sub-Reddits were switched to private in the largest user-led online protest. 

The movement is frustrated over price changes in developer fees, which could amount to millions of dollars for some users.

The protest is set to remain for 48 hours, but some users have warned they will not revert pages to public if Reddit does not reconsider the increased pricing plans for apps that provide access to the site.

Users flocked to Twitter to inquire about a possible outage hitting Reddit, with one tweeting: ‘Nice to see even Reddit itself getting in on the Reddit Blackout today.’

Reddit has been hit with a worldwide outage impacting millions of users as forums ‘go dark’ to protest the website’s increased developer fees 

The massive protest is in response to Reddit announcing it would charge access to its application programming interface (API) for third parties with ‘additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.’

And the increased pricing is set to hit on July 1.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman addressed users’ ‘frustrations’ in a Friday post to the site, laying out how the changes will work.

‘Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user/month for a typical Reddit third-party app),’ Hoffman wrote.

He continued: ‘Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.’

While Hoffman is looking out for the future of Reddit, the move could force some app developers to shut down. 

Christian Selig, the developer of Reddit client app Apollo, said the increased pricing new pricing would cost him as much as $20 million per year, Variety reports.

Apollo lets users view content from numerous sources such as Imgur, Reddit and YouTube, in one place.

Selig continued explaining that this means Apollo plans to stop operations on June 30. 

He tweeted about the Blackout Sunday, thanking ‘the Reddit community and everyone standing up.’

Twitter users Rebecca Sl 

The social news website went down while more than 6,500 subreddits went dark in one of the largest user-driven protests due to new developer fees

Other popular apps that connect to Reddit include Reddit is Fun, Sync and ReddPlanet.

Monday’s outage, however, is plaguing users worldwide.

DownDetector, a website that monitors online outages, showed more than 40,000 issues reports in the US at 10:41 am ET.

Other parts of the world, like the UK, Europe and Asia, are also experiencing issues with the platform.  

However, Reddit has been experiencing outages nearly every day in the last few weeks – the most recent was Sunday and before that was June 7.