Reddit experienced a massive global service disruption on Monday morning, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access the popular social platform. The outage triggered widespread connection errors across both the website and the mobile application starting at approximately 11:20 a.m. ET.
Scale of the Disruption
Monitoring service Downdetector reported a sharp spike in user complaints, with incident reports peaking at over 90,000 during the height of the downtime. Users worldwide reported being unable to load content or interact with subreddits.
Company Response and Resolution
At 11:52 a.m. ET, the official Reddit Status page acknowledged the incident, confirming that engineers were investigating “elevated errors” impacting the platform’s core infrastructure.
The technical team identified the root cause shortly thereafter. By 12:10 p.m. ET, a fix was implemented, and the company began monitoring system stability. Full functionality was officially restored by 12:21 p.m. ET.
Root Cause Identified
A Reddit spokesperson clarified the nature of the technical failure: “We were briefly unable to connect to one of our databases, which caused the outage. A fix was quickly deployed, and we are now up and running.”
Recurring Stability Issues
While the service has returned to normal operation, this incident marks a continuation of recent technical instability. According to the company’s own status logs, Reddit has faced similar “elevated error” issues three times throughout February, as well as an additional disruption just a few weeks ago.