Reddit faces brief outage amid protest against new API policy

Representation image (Photo: Reddit)


Amid subreddits’ protest against the company’s new application programming interface (API) pricing changes, social discussion platform Reddit faced a brief outage.

The company has now fixed the issue which caused problems while loading content.

According to Reddit’s status page, the outage started on Monday.

Taking to Twitter, several users reported the issue.

While one user posted, “Reddit down for anybody?? #Reddit”, another said, “#reddit melting down rn.”

According to the outage monitor website DownDetector, 54 per cent of people had reported problems while using the website, 33 per cent while using the application, and 14 with server connection.

Last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman had hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session to discuss the platform’s controversial API changes, confirming that the company is not planning to revive its coming API pricing changes that have caused multiple developers to announce they will be shutting down their apps.

Following the new API pricing changes at the social discussion platform, more than 6,000 subreddits have gone dark, including many of the platform’s most-subscribed communities such as r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, r/music, and r/science, meaning these communities are no longer publicly accessible, even to Reddit users who previously subscribed to them.

Many subreddits taking part in the protest are planning to go private for 48 hours, but some plan to remain private until things change.