On Saturday, Reddit status notified its users on Twitter that they are suffering an outage due to “elevated level of errors” at 06.09 PDT. During this time, users across U.S. East Coast and Northern Europe could not load the Reddit page.
Bleeping computer reported that users from Europe (Finland, Spain, Italy, Portugal), Canada, the Philippines, and Australia faced trouble while loading the website. Downdetector.com registered a peak of almost 15,000 Reddit down reports on this particular day.
Image Source: Bleeping computer
Twitter was flooded with user messages questioning the status of Reddit.
Hi @reddit is your site/ app down or something? I can't post, comment or see my notifications and messages. Please fix. pic.twitter.com/wKEgEgwddq
— Majestic (@Majesti20934027) August 31, 2019
i know it is a huge sin to talk about reddit outside of reddit but is @reddit down? it aint loading for me, i have nowhere to ask this question lol #reddit
— Albert. (@whoisanthracite) August 31, 2019
@reddit You guys are.. how should I put it… Not quite working? Please fix, Reddit is life 😭 pic.twitter.com/1ity1ByafO
— Blade (@Blade67470) August 31, 2019
After some time at 07:53 PDT, Reddit tweeted that they have identified the issue behind the outage.
Identified: Our hosting provider, AWS, is having an incident that is affecting us. We're working to mitigate the issue. https://t.co/pt0DigKoV2
— reddit status (@redditstatus) August 31, 2019
Meanwhile, users trying to open any page on Reddit received messages that said, “Sorry, we couldn’t load posts for this page.” or “Sorry, for some reason Reddit can’t be reached.”
Read Also: Reddit’s 2018 Transparency report includes copyright removals, restorations, and more!
Finally, the outage was resolved at 12:36 PDT on the same day. Reddit tweeted, “Resolved: This incident has been resolved.” No further details have been posted by Reddit or AWS.
Reddit status page reported that the Amazon AWS issue affected seven Reddit.com components including Desktop Web, Mobile Web, Native Mobile Apps, Vote Processing, Comment Processing, Spam Processing, and Modmail.
A user commented on Bleeping computer’s post,“Looks like Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Relational Database Service (RDS) (and Workspaces, whatever that is) took a hit for US-EAST-1 at that time. From the status updates, maybe due to a big hardware failure.
Perhaps Reddit has realized there is value in keeping a redundant stack running in a western region. They could have instantly mitigated the outage by flipping traffic with Route 53 to the healthy stack in this case.”
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