Reddit Restores Service After Update Triggers Hour-Long Global Outage

Reddit suffered a worldwide service disruption on 16 July that blocked access to feeds, subreddits and comments across its desktop site, mobile web and apps. Downdetector logged between 130,000 and 138,000 outage reports at the height of the incident, principally from the United States and the United Kingdom, beginning around 11:20 a.m. Eastern Time. The platform traced the failure to an update that "caused some instability," according to a company spokesperson. Engineers rolled back the change, implemented a fix at 12:21 p.m. ET and fully restored service by 12:38 p.m., after which the firm continued to monitor performance. Reddit, one of the world’s ten most-visited websites, experiences short-lived technical incidents several times a month, but the scale of Wednesday’s outage was larger than its most recent interruptions. The company has not provided further detail on the malfunction, beyond confirming that no malicious activity was involved.