Reddit is crashing because of the growing subreddit blackout

Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.

According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.

On Monday morning, Reddit’s status page reported a “major outage” affecting Reddit’s desktop and mobile sites and its native mobile apps. “We’re aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible,” the company wrote on the status page in a message at 10:58AM ET.

At 11:47AM PT, the company wrote that “We’re observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users. We will continue to closely monitor the situation.” Rathschmidt didn’t have an ETA for when things would be fixed, but the status has switched from “major outage” back to “operational.”

Things do seem to be recovering. For many Verge staffers, Reddit.com wasn’t loading, but now it is. There were around 45,000 user reports of issues on Downdetector at the peak of the issues, but the reports have since fallen significantly.

A site that had been tracking the number of subreddits to have gone private on a Twitch stream also appeared to be broken as a result of the outage, but has returned to normal. “Count will be wrong for a while,” according to a message that had appeared on the live Twitch stream following the count. “It’s Reddit not working.” That message is no longer present.

More than 7,000 subreddits have gone private or read-only in response to the API pricing terms, which is forcing the developers of apps like Apollo for Reddit to shut down at the end of the month. (If the tracking links in my previous paragraph don’t work, try this one.) The new pricing will potentially be prohibitively expensive for developers, with Apollo for Reddit creator Christian Selig saying that he would have to pay more than $20 million per year to operate the app. Many subreddits are going dark for 48 hours, from June 12th through June 14th, but some have chosen to stay private indefinitely until something changes at Reddit.