Reddit Experiences WIDESPREAD Outage Prior to Scheduled API Modifications; Thousands of Subreddits Offline
Reddit, the widely used discussion forum, experienced a significant worldwide outage on June 12th. Downdetector, an online outage monitor, reported that up to 45,000 users had difficulty accessing the website and various subreddits. The outage coincided with a planned protest by thousands of subreddits against the company’s new API pricing changes, resulting in the subreddits going private. The company’s outage was partly attributed to the subreddits going dark. The subreddits are expected to continue their protest until June 14th.
A Reddit spokesperson told The Verge that “a significant number of subreddits going private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working to resolve the expected issue.” Servers returned to normal after a few hours, but many major subreddits are still unavailable to people.
What are subreddits?
Reddit is a modern forum-based platform where different communities are called subreddits. Subreddits cater to a variety of interests, hobbies, and topics that members can join, post, and comment on. These signatures are managed by moderators, who are members who either founded the community or are appointed by the creator to manage posts and enforce the rules. Some of the biggest subreddits have as many as 30-40 million members.
Reddit can be accessed either through the official website and app, or through many third-party apps that use the Reddit API to build their own interface and offer additional features for a smoother user experience.
Reddit’s new API model
In April, Reddit announced changes to its API model to limit the number of API requests made by a third-party client. It also updated the pricing terms for API requests. The move was initially seen as a way for the company to pay developers who use its AI platforms to take Reddit content to answer user questions.
Bad news for third-party apps
Two weeks ago, Christian Selig, the developer of Apollo, a third-party iOS app for Reddit, shared a message in which he revealed that the platform charges about $12,000 for 50 million requests. Selig also explained that with about 7 billion API requests (Apollo’s stats from the previous month), it would have to pay Reddit $1.7 million a month, or $20 million a year, just to keep operating.
“While Reddit has been communicative and civil throughout this process with half a dozen back-and-forth calls that I think went really well, I don’t see how this pricing is based in reality or even remotely reasonable. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money or even know how to charge it from a credit card,” Selig wrote in the message.
Apollo isn’t the only one affected by this. Many third-party apps believe they are in a similar situation. The popular Android-based app Reddit Is Fun has also announced that the app will stop working from June 30. Apollo and Naharwal, another third-party app, have also given similar timelines before these apps are taken offline.
Why the subreddits protest?
A huge number of Reddit users, including moderators of many large subreddits, use these apps to post and manage their communities, and this move has not gone down well with them. Furious Redditors have now decided to take their subreddit private to protest the new pricing policy.
These subreddits include major communities such as r/funny, r/gaming, r/gadgets, and r/todayilearned. The planned protest was announced to last 48 hours and end on June 14.
Reddit is unlikely to decline
On Friday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hosted an AMA (ask me anything) where he said, “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining company, and to do that we can no longer support commercial entities that require large-scale data usage.” .
In response to a user query about whether Reddit was considering delaying the implementation of API pricing for 90 days, Huffman said, “We’re continuing to work with people who want to work with us. For what it’s worth, that includes a lot of apps that haven’t been in the spotlight this week.”
However, it seems that Reddit is not giving up on its pricing plans just yet.
