Reddit down amid major protest

Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world. The mass outage comes amid a major boycott from thousands of the site’s administrators, who are protessting new changes to the platform. On 12 June, popular sub-Reddits like r/videos and r/bestof went dark in retaliation to proposed API (Application Programming Interface) charges for third-party app developers. Among the apps impacted by the new pricing is popular iOS app Apollo, which announced last week that it was unable to afford the new costs and would be shutting down. 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. In a Q&A session on Reddit on Friday, the site’s 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.” Website health monitor DownDetector registered more than 7,000 outage reports for Reddit on Monday. Some users were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.” Others received an error warning that stated: “Our CDN [content delivery network] was unable to reach our servers.” The Independent has reached out to Reddit for further information about the issues. More to follow. Read More Popular Reddit app Apollo shuts down as site’s users revolt against it Millions of Reddit users face a blackout over pricing revolt Elon Musk refuses to pay Twitter’s Google bill, leaving site in peril Elon Musk refuses to pay Twitter’s Google bill, leaving site in peril Apple’s headset is not the most important thing it announced this week Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good