Reddit Crashes Big Time: Millions Hit by Outage Across US, Australia & More
Millions of Reddit users were left scratching their heads on Wednesday as the site went down hard. Just before 3 PM ET, users across the US, Australia, and beyond were slammed with error messages like, “Upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. Reset reason: connection failure.”
Massive Outage Sparks Fury Worldwide
Downdetector flagged a staggering 47,000+ reports at the peak around 3:30 PM ET, signalling a huge service disruption. Australian users blasted the platform on social media, while complaints also poured in from the UK and other countries.
Even by 5:20 PM ET, thousands of users were still affected, with outage reports hovering near 32,000.
Reddit Scrambles to Fix Glitch
At 4 PM ET, Reddit broke silence on X (formerly Twitter), confirming they were on the case. By 4:45 PM, a spokesperson told UKNIP a fix was live and the site was slowly coming back online.
The cause? A bug in a recent update. By 8 PM ET, outage complaints plummeted to just 400, signalling a near-full recovery.
“There was a bug in a recent update we made, but a fix is in place and we’re ramping back up,” said Reddit.
Not the First Time Reddit Has Flopped
This isn’t Reddit’s first tech headache. Earlier this year on Election Day in the US, the site faced similar “degraded performance” issues that took hours to resolve.
Reddit’s Soaring Popularity Amid Growing Pains
As one of the world’s top 10 most-visited websites, Reddit packs a punch with 73 million daily users. The San Francisco giant went public in March 2024 and finally turned a profit in October, a major milestone since launching on the stock market.
Still, keeping the site running smoothly for such a huge crowd remains a challenge.
Users Vent and Meme the Madness
Frustrated Redditors flooded other social platforms during the blackout, turning outage chaos into meme gold on X. Now that service is back, they’re hoping for rock-solid stability to keep the downtime disasters at bay.
