Reddit Is Down
reddit.com
reddit.com
Scrolling through their uptime history, it looks like this was the biggest incident in 3 years, perhaps longer,
https://www.redditstatus.com/uptime?page=14
https://www.redditstatus.com/uptime?page=16
I looked through the whole thing back to 2011/09 and there was never more than a "6 component partial outage". Only a few "1 component major outage":
https://www.redditstatus.com/uptime?page=26
The one just now was a "7 component major outage". Annoyingly, these links are going to be inaccurate in the future since they're paged from the present date.
If I want to go to reddit, I go. If it's down, I notice this easily, and I say to myself "I guess it's down", and then I move on with my life.
If I don't visit the site while it is down, do I need to know that it is down? No. I do not. If I (attempt to) visit the site while it is down, the very nature of attempting to visit a site that is down will inform me that the site is down. Under no circumstances do I need, or want, a HN post, or a post on any other site, telling me of such a thing.
Later in-depth analyses of what caused the outage are welcome, of course, because those contain information that I will not have already obtained on my own.
Half the content on this website is stuff that doesn't interest me, but that's the nature of crowd sourcing what interests people.
Does reddit do post mortems? If it did then we might have a clue.
(they were "brigading" other subs)
or maybe something more basic
All you have to do is exhaust enough database fetching and rendering on the backend for non-cached content and even amazon goes down (ie. black friday downtime).
It would take an impressive amount of resources but who knows what blackhatters are selling these days.