The virtual protest over Reddit’s API changes caused the social media platform to briefly crash on Monday morning.
Reddit suffered an outage that lasted over an hour right as thousands of individual forums, known as subreddits, decided to protest the platform’s controversial decision to charge access to its API, which risks shutting down several third-party apps.
The subreddits went private, blocking users from accessing and posting new content to their pages. Over 7,100 subreddits have since gone dark, which apparently triggered an error in Reddit’s internal systems.
“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” a Reddit spokesperson told PCMag.
The outage also prompted Reddit to post page errors. The platform has since restored access, but many of the largest subreddits are still dark, drastically cutting down on user activity. According to Reddark, which is tracking the protests, 7,254 subreddits have so far gone private.
The outage and ensuing protest risks cratering user traffic to Reddit, which plans on charging $0.24 per 1,000 API calls for third-party apps that need high-volume access. But so far the social media platform has refused to back down on the change, which will take effect next month.
“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,” Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman wrote in a post on Friday.
However, the protesting subreddits say the coming API change will undermine the platform by jeopardizing third-party apps users rely on to access the site, along with tools volunteer moderators use to fight spam and abuse. “Do not sacrifice long-term viability for the sake of a short-lived illusion,” reads a post from the subreddit r/pics. “Do not tacitly enable bad actors by working against your volunteers.”
Some subreddits plan on participating in the protest for 48 hours, but others say they've gone dark indefinitely. Meanwhile, the third-party Reddit client Apollo has already declared it’s going to shut down since it would cost the app $20 million per year to operate under the new API change.