Is Reddit Down? How to Check and What to Do

Posts are not loading. Comments are failing. The upvote button does nothing. Reddit outages are frustrating because the platform is often the first place people go to check if other services are down. When Reddit itself goes down, one of the internet's primary information-sharing channels disappears.

This guide covers how to check if Reddit is down, what causes outages, and what to do when the site is unavailable.

How to Check if Reddit Is Down

Check the Official Status Page

Reddit maintains a public status page at redditstatus.com. It shows the status of individual components including the website, mobile apps, API, search, and notifications. During active incidents, Reddit posts updates with timestamps.

Use Is That Down

Is That Down monitors Reddit's status page automatically and sends alerts when incidents are posted. You get notified within minutes of an outage starting. For a general approach, see how to check if a service is down.

Check Downdetector

Downdetector shows real-time user reports for Reddit. A sharp spike in reports over the last 30 minutes confirms an active issue.

Try Old Reddit or the App

If the main site (reddit.com) is down, try old.reddit.com. The old Reddit interface uses a different frontend that sometimes continues working when the redesign has issues. Similarly, if the website is down, try the mobile app (or vice versa).

Check Social Media

Search "reddit down" on Twitter/X. Reddit outages trend quickly because the affected user base is large and vocal.

Common Causes of Reddit Outages

Infrastructure Scaling

Reddit handles massive traffic. Popular posts on the front page, AMA events, and breaking news drive sudden traffic spikes. When the infrastructure cannot scale fast enough, users experience slow loading, failed comments, or complete unavailability.

Database Issues

Reddit's comment system and voting mechanics generate enormous database load. Comment threads with tens of thousands of replies, real-time vote counting, and the ranking algorithms that power the front page all put pressure on backend databases. Database contention is a recurring source of Reddit performance problems.

CDN and Caching Issues

Reddit relies on content delivery networks and caching layers to serve pages quickly. When cache invalidation goes wrong or CDN configuration changes introduce errors, users see stale content, missing images, or error pages.

Deployment Problems

Reddit ships code updates regularly. Occasionally, a deployment introduces a bug that affects production. Reddit's engineering team typically detects and rolls back problematic deployments within an hour, but the initial disruption affects all users.

Third-Party Dependencies

Reddit integrates with external services for media hosting, video processing, authentication, and payment processing (Reddit Premium, awards). An outage in any of these dependencies can cause partial Reddit failures.

What to Do When Reddit Is Down

For Browsing

Switch to a cached version. Google's cache (search for a Reddit post and click the cached link) may show recent content. The Wayback Machine occasionally has snapshots of popular posts.

Alternative discussion platforms. Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) covers technology topics. Lemmy is a federated Reddit alternative. Discord servers for specific communities often have active discussions.

For Moderators

If you moderate a subreddit, you lose access to moderation tools during an outage. Automod rules and scheduled posts will not run. After the outage, check your moderation queue for anything that accumulated.

For API Users and Bot Operators

If you run bots or applications that use the Reddit API, implement retry logic with exponential backoff. Do not hammer the API during an outage; this makes recovery harder. Check redditstatus.com for API-specific status.

How to Get Notified About Future Reddit Outages

Subscribe to the Reddit status page. redditstatus.com offers email subscriptions for incident notifications.

Use automated monitoring. Is That Down monitors Reddit's status and sends alerts through email, Slack, or webhooks. See the vendor monitoring guide for a complete setup.

Notable Reddit Outages

June 2023 API Protest Blackout

In June 2023, thousands of subreddits went private or read-only in protest against Reddit's API pricing changes. While not a technical outage, the effect was similar: vast portions of Reddit's content became inaccessible. The protest highlighted how dependent Reddit's value is on its volunteer moderators and community contributors.

August 2023 Search and Feed Issues

In August 2023, Reddit experienced widespread issues with search functionality and home feed loading. Users reported that search returned no results and the home feed showed old or irrelevant content. The issues lasted several hours and were traced to backend infrastructure problems.

References

• Reddit Status - Official Reddit status page with real-time component status.
• Downdetector - Reddit - User-reported outage data for Reddit.

Beyond vendor monitoring, consider uptime monitoring for your own services and DNS monitoring to catch infrastructure issues.