Why is Reddit down?
MAJOR websites including Amazon, Twitter, Reddit and Spotify have gone down in a mass internet outage. Problems began around 10.30am BST (5.30am ET) on Tuesday, according to online outage tracker Down Detector. Independent outage tracker Down Detector says that tens of thousands of people worldwide have reported issues with Reddit. It's unclear what's causing the outage on the social news and entertainment website, but it is suspected that the fault lies with Fastly. with other sites also experiencing issues. Visitors to affected sites are met with a "503 error" message, and are unable to load the page. The data centre provider crashed early in the morning on Tuesday, June 8, 2021. On its website, Fastly says that it is currently investigating the issue, which it calls a "global disruption". At 12pm (BST), Fastly updated the status saying that "the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied". Others have suggested on social media that the outages may be the result of problems at Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a cloud computing platform that powers many of the world's most popular websites, including Amazon. According to DownDetector, Amazon Web Services has also been hit by an outage this morning. San Francisco-based company Reddit gave no indication as to when it expected its services to be fully restored. Internet users can check the Down Detector website to find out if Reddit is down. According to the website, 13,878 users reported issues with Reddit at around 11am on the morning of June 8, 2021. The most reported problems were with the website (65 per cent), while 32 per cent had issues with the app. According to Down Detector, Reddit users last experienced major issues in May 2021. Comments on the site from users say they were receiving a message saying "Server error, tap to retry". Some speculated the website being down in May 2021 was due to an overload of searches for cryptocurrency.