Widespread Outages Reported by Users as San Francisco-Based Reddit Experiences Service Interruptions

Reddit users on Wednesday afternoon found that much of the San Francisco-based social media platform had temporarily gone dark.

Tens of thousands of outage reports popped up on Downdetector, a website status tracker, citing nonloading timelines, subreddits and posts. Even as some functions returned to the site for users within minutes, other sections, like post comments, remained empty. In lieu of a comment section on one post, the site displayed, “Sorry, for some reason reddit can’t be reached.”

The company flagged the outages on its status page, writing at 1:58 p.m., “We are currently investigating elevated error rates across Reddit.” The page labeled Reddit’s “Desktop Web,” “Mobile Web,” and “Native Mobile Apps” categories with “Major Outage.”

At 2:34, the status page had a new update: “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”

Reddit’s site crashed on June 12 at the beginning of a widespread moderator protest, when thousands of subreddit communities across the platform went private to protest the company’s planned changes to data access.

On Wednesday afternoon, Downdetector’s comment section filled with disparate complaints — a home page wouldn’t load, users couldn’t log in, subreddits appeared down. As the site slowly came back to full strength and outage reports lessened, users provided suggestions for ways to skirt the outage and swapped jokes about being addicted to the platform.

This is a breaking news story.