Reddit stopped working for millions of users around the world on Monday as thousands of Reddit communities launched a protest against the platform's policy to charge third-party apps for data access.
The blackout was a response to Reddit's announcement in April to update its API terms, which would require developers to pay significant fees for accessing the application programming interface.
During the outage, users encountered empty Reddit posts and a message stating, "Something went wrong. Just don't panic." The #RedditBlackout hashtag quickly trended on Twitter, with thousands of tweets and searches related to the issue.
Nice to see even Reddit itself getting in on the Reddit Blackout today. pic.twitter.com/FKYy2ISonh
— Alex Winton (@doctoroak) June 12, 2023
While the website resumed functioning after about two hours, a coalition of Reddit moderators and users continued to engage in a standoff with the company.
The blackout was primarily caused by a substantial number of subreddits shifting to private, leading to anticipated stability issues. Reddit acknowledged the problem and worked to resolve it.
The protest gained significant participation, with over 7,800 unique subreddits planning to join the blackout, including popular communities like r/funny, which boasts over 40 million users.
Apollo CEO Christian Selig claimed that Reddit would charge up to $20 million per year in order to operate, prompting the mass protest from Reddit communities.
Apollo will close down on June 30th. Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue. Thank you so, so much for all the support over the years. ❤️ https://t.co/HOJaLMW8fx
— Christian Selig (@ChristianSelig) June 8, 2023
Under the updated API terms, developers would be charged $12,000 for 50 million API requests. Reddit's pricing adjustment follows a similar move by Twitter in March when it started charging developers for API access.
While the outage problem has been resolved, the protests continue, with numerous subreddits choosing to remain private indefinitely until there are changes to the API pricing policy.
The standoff highlights the concerns raised by developers and users about the potential financial burden and the impact on accessibility apps.
In a Q&A session on Reddit on Friday, CEO Steve Huffman defended the new pricing.
“Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” said Mr Huffman, who goes by the Reddit username u/spez.
“For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”
In response to the latest outage, one Reddit user wrote on Twitter: “Spez, YOU broke Reddit.”
