Reddit Crashes Due To Site-Wide Protests By Users Over API Changes
Photo 57169139 © RalucaEpps | Dreamstime.com
Thousands of subreddits intentionally “going dark” actually caused a blackout across Reddit, as the popular social networking site briefly went offline on Monday morning.
Over 8,000 message boards—including some with tens of millions of members—pledged to go private or appear as read-only from June 12 through at least June 14, and even “indefinitely,” to rail against the company’s decision to charge developers to use its API.
Currently, access to the Reddit API is free, and it allows developers to tap into the website’s data and create apps to display Reddit content on alternative interfaces. However, as of July 1, third-party creators who require high-volume traffic will be charged US$0.24 per 1,000 API calls, or US$12,000 for every 50 million queries.
â„¹ï¸ Note: Reddit is experiencing international outages; the incident comes amid a widespread boycott of the platform due to changes in its transparency and API policies, and is not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #RedditDown pic.twitter.com/1OImk9ndbi
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) June 12, 2023
In an uncomfortable announcement, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman shared in a post: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”
Tim Rathschmidt, the company’s director of consumer and product communications, said Reddit spends “multi-millions of dollars” on hosting, and will therefore have to be “fairly paid” to continue supporting popular community-made apps.
US$0.24 for 1,000 API requests might not seem like much, but it’s more than enough to tip the most notable third-party Reddit reader, Apollo, over the edge. Apollo’s founder Christian Selig has said the new pricing model will force his app to dole out US$20 million per year.
Unable to afford the new costs, Selig regrettably announced that the popular iOS app will shut down on June 30, just a day before Reddit’s scheme takes effect.
In defense of app developers like Selig, Reddit communities went dark on Monday. This blanket opposition apparently messed with Reddit’s servers, causing the website to crash from around 10:25 am ET to 1:26 pm.
Confirming the reason for the outage, a Reddit representative told news outlets, including PCMag, that the platform had faced “some expected stability issues” as a result of several message boards “shifting to private.”
As per Reddark, a channel monitoring the protests, nearly 8,000 subreddits have either gone private or switched to read-only as of the time of writing this article. These forums include the much-followed r/gaming, r/videos, r/music, and r/earthporn threads.
While the site is back up and running, the user-led demonstrations continue to intensify.
[via PCMag, Ars Technica, PR Week, cover photo 57169139 © RalucaEpps | Dreamstime.com]
