Reddit experienced a “major outage” on Monday as thousands of subreddits took part in a coordinated “blackout” to protest the platform’s new API pricing. Reddit’s new plan is reportedly similar to the new API price increase at Twitter, and the new policy at Reddit is what prompted Monday’s wide-scale protest.
The blackout plan was put into place last week, and as promised, the protest kicked off on the morning of June 12. While Reddit knew about the blackout plans (reportedly involving at least 7,000 subreddits), that still didn’t prevent the site from crashing.
“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” a Reddit spokesperson told The Verge after the publication reported.
As for the reason for the protest, subreddit moderators heavily rely on third-party apps to maintain and customize their communities. The API price increase will potentially eliminate a significant chunk of those apps. Via the r/Save3rdPartyApps subreddit, which kicked off the protest:
Even if you’re not a mobile user and don’t use any of those apps, this is a step toward killing other ways of customizing Reddit, such as Reddit Enhancement Suite or the use of the old.reddit.com desktop interface .
This isn’t only a problem on the user level: many subreddit moderators depend on tools only available outside the official app to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free.”
As of this writing, Reddit has moved from “major outage” to “operational,” but the subreddits still remain private in protest of the API pricing plan.
(Via The Verge)