Social discussion forum Reddit faced outages as thousands of Reddit communities launched a protest against its policy to implement API pricing changes or charge third-party apps for data access. As many as 7,000 Reddit communities, which have millions of subscribers, are protesting against new API pricing changes that could kill off third-party apps, media reports say.
“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” Reddit was quoted as saying in a statement to NBC News.
Reddit later fixed the issue which caused problems while loading content. According to Reddit's status page, the outage started on Monday.
According to the outage monitoring website DownDetector, 54 per cent of people had reported problems while using the website, 33 per cent while using the application, and 14 with server connection.
Last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman had hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session to discuss the platform's controversial API changes, confirming that the company is not planning to revive its coming API pricing changes that have caused multiple developers to announce they will be shutting down their apps.
Following the new API pricing changes at the social discussion platform, more than 6,000 subreddits have gone dark, including many of the platform's most-subscribed communities such as r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, r/music, and r/science, meaning these communities are no longer publicly accessible, even to Reddit users who previously subscribed to them.
Many subreddits taking part in the protest are planning to go private for 48 hours, but some plan to remain private until things change.
Meanwhile, #RedditBlackout hashtag trended on Twitter after the Reddit blackout started with thousands of tweets being posted on the micro-blogging platform. Some of the tweets with the hashtag #RedditBlackout were: