It’s a normal day. You hop on Reddit to check the latest news, memes, and other pieces of content that you might be into, but you run into one problem: you find the site is down and it won’t load. You check Reddit’s status page and find out the site is experiencing technical difficulties that are preventing things from working. There’s nothing you can do except wait. It most commonly happens when the server is overloaded or overcapacity, down or unreachable because of a network problem, or their IT workers scheduled a maintenance break that required a shutdown of the site.
We can essentially say Reddit’s servers are unreliable. Their servers almost always go down twice a week like a rollercoaster. Reddit’s IT workers often have difficulty keeping their servers running at all times. Reddit allows anyone to be a news editor, but it’s a public forum used by nearly half a billion people worldwide and when this happens, the majority of Reddit users can’t use the site.
Reddit is nowhere to be seen in the list of websites known to experience the worst outages. The site experienced eight outages ever since 2022 began. According to DownDetector, Reddit experiences 80% more outages than any other website. Some of these outages can be really long. Reddit has commonly blamed elevated error rates as the primary culprit in its outages, implying the site going overcapacity on a frequent basis. More commonly or not, equipment failures are also causes of outages. Amazon Web Services can also be blamed if their servers go down. It happened three times in December 2021, and this means even if you aren’t hosted by Amazon Web Services, you could be using a site that is in fact hosted by AWS and one error at this one company can bring you down.
These outages have caught the attention of critics and the press. Whenever Reddit goes down, anger flares. Reddit’s reliability problems are far pervasive, and some outages can happen on days that are supposedly quiet. Simply put, we can put Reddit at the bottom of the tier list for reliability. We can say that Reddit is falling behind on uptime and their server performance is deteriorating. Their staff needs to prepare for improving performance when the next major cyber attack comes along.
Drillimation Systems 