Hours of Broken Reddit Search Now Fixed

Reddit search had some issues for hours, according to posts from some frustrated Reddit users, but the problems appear to be addressed after Reddit implemented a fix.

When the issues were happening, when doing a search while logged in, I didn’t see any posts in the results. For example, if I searched “iPhone” in r/Apple while logged in on Old Reddit, I would have expected to see a lot of posts about Apple’s smartphones. But instead, I saw a message that “there doesn’t seem to be anything here.” When I searched on the app, I didn’t see any posts, either.

That said, searches weren’t totally broken. When searching terms from reddit.com on Old Reddit, I can still see suggestions for some subreddits to join. When searching from the Home tab in the Reddit app on iOS, I can see results for comments, communities, and people. And when I search for something on Reddit while logged out, the results do show individual posts.

But the issues did mean that if you were logged in, you couldn’t search for specific posts within subreddits. And it wasn’t just me: many users were reporting similar issues, with one post on r/help from very early on Monday receiving more than 30 comments. If you did still want to search for individual posts while there were issues, you could do so through a Google site search, and one user spelled out how to do that.

On Monday at 5:14PM ET, the company acknowledged that it was looking into something wrong with search. “We are currently investigating elevated search error rates,” the company wrote on its status page. At 6:21PM ET, the company updated the page to say that a fix had been implemented, and for me, the fix did fix the problems I was seeing with search.

Reddit didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Update July 17th, 6:45PM ET: Added new status message from Reddit.