Social website Reddit experienced an outage just as thousands of its communities went dark, protesting a controversial new policy that threatens to put third-party apps out of business.
According to Reddit a spokesperson, the outage was caused by the protests against the new policy, with the site experiencing issues at around 10:25 am Eastern Time (10:35 pm Philippine Time).
"A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we've been working on resolving the anticipated issue," stated spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt to TechCrunch.
Thousands of subreddits—Reddits term for the small communities it fosters—went dark on Monday in one of the largest protests to date on the site. The issue being protested is Reddit's new API pricing policy, which goes into effect on July 1, 2023. Said policy raises the cost for the developers of third-party Reddit apps, to the point that many may end up shutting down their businesses.
One of the more popular Reddit apps, Apollo, has already announced that it will shut down its service by June 30. Apollo is notable in that it was singled out by Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, claiming bad behavior on the developer's part. (Read: Mastodon is not Twitter, and it has enough differences that we should pay attention)
Some accessibility-focused communities expressed concern about the shutdown of their preferred apps, pointing out that Reddit's official mobile client did not meet their needs. In response, Reddit relented, stating that a handful of accessibility-focused apps would be exempt from the new policy.
Meanwhile, around 5,000 subreddits joined it by "going dark"—switching their forums to private instead of public—impacting their visibility both inside Reddit and on external search engines. The protest is set to last for 48 hours. That said, some communities, such as the r/iPhone subreddit, are set to extend the protest "indefinitely."
As for Reddit's outage, as of 11:47 am ET, Reddit's status page stated that the company was "observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users." The company also promised that they would continue to "closely monitor" the situation.
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