It’s been a great day for Reddit. Thousands of communities temporarily closed stores to protest changes the company is making to its API, which affects many third-party apps. Furthermore, the platform experienced “significant outages” across the desktop and mobile sites, as well as the mobile apps.
Read message in Reddit status page As of 10:58 a.m. ET. By 11:30 am, the site was loading again. “We are monitoring improvements across the site and expect the issue to recover for most users. We will continue to monitor the situation closely,” an update posted at 11:47 a.m.
“A large number of subreddits that went private caused some expected stability issues, and we are working on the expected issue,” Reddit told Engadget in a statement. At 1:26 p.m., the company said the outage had been resolved and things were back to normal, with the exception of the protest.
bot He was keeping track of all the subreddits that had gone private as part of the protests. As you might expect, the bot was out while Reddit was down, however It works again.
Reddit said in April that it would begin charging for access to its API, which third-party developers have used in thousands of apps that link to the platform, such as moderation tools. While the primary target of the API changes may have been companies scraping Reddit for content to train language-learning models for generative AI systems, the move was a huge blow to those making third-party clients that many editors prefer over the company. website or applications.
One of the most prominent third-party clients, Apollo, will be shutting down at the end of this month as a result of API changes. The maker of the app, Christian Selig, claimed that it would have to pay $20 million a year to keep Apollo running as it is. RIF, another widely used third-party Reddit app, will be shutting down on June 30 as well.
Reddit CEO Steve Hoffman defended API changes in AMAs that occurred before subreddits became private in protest. He said the new policy was part of an effort to make Reddit profitable. “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do so we can no longer support commercial entities that require extensive data use,” he wrote. “Some apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided that this price isn’t good for their business and will shut down before the price becomes effective.”
Update 1:28 PM ET 6/12: Indicating that the outage has been resolved.
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