Reddit was hit by a reported outage Tuesday afternoon, and the number of people saying the platform was not working rose fast enough to make the spike hard to miss. On Down Detector, reports climbed from more than 15,000 to close to 29,000 within 15 minutes.
The surge began around 4:15 p.m. EDT, when users started flagging access problems in large numbers. By the time the reports peaked, 80% of those complaints said the app would not load, while 9% said the feed or timeline was not loading and 7% pointed to server connection problems.
That is why the Reddit Down Detector search was suddenly drawing attention Tuesday: the site was showing a widespread access failure rather than a small cluster of isolated glitches. Down Detector tracks outages based on user reports, so the jump in volume pointed to a broad problem affecting thousands of Reddit users at once.
There is, though, one detail that does not sit neatly with the rest of the numbers. The report count was described as close to 29,000 as of the writing, but the graph also showed between 25,000 and 3,000 users reporting issues with Reddit, a spread that reflects how quickly the total was moving while the outage was still unfolding.
What caused the Reddit outage was not clear from the reports available Tuesday, and the source did not confirm when service was restored. As of the writing, close to 29,000 users were still reporting problems, leaving the main question not whether the platform had been hit, but how long the disruption would last.
