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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Pointless speculation. Reddit has constant outages of this exact nature almost weekly. There's nothing special about this one.

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Reddit 100% has stated that it was because of the sub blackout.

> According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/12/23758002/reddit-crashing-...

Them "anticipating" "expected" issues with... people visiting reddit less sounds a bit weird...

Making a ton of subs private does a lot more than change view counts.

Reddit definitely doesn’t have outages like this almost weekly. Maybe 10+ years ago, but it’s rare now.

It's often not working for me in the UK e.g. "You've broken reddit" and "Can't reach CDN".

Maybe it is a regional thing?

Eastern US here. I will get those errors a few times a week but I'd say 80% of the time it works on a refresh and most of the rest of the time it's back within 30s.

Might be, I’m US west coast fwiw.

Also very common for when you post a comment that it appears to not have posted it and returns an error, then you retry multiple times and get multiple comments posted. And even if you don't get hit by one of those outages, they tend to get saved in the comments from everyone else having hit them.

For me in the EU it fails once a year or so and only on the few occasions I use reddit's own webpage instead of a third party app or web like libreddit.

Not true at all in regards to 10+ years ago. Once at week, if not more, Reddit fails to load for me. I refresh the page and it appears I've been logged out. Continue refreshing the page until my session is revived and things are back to normal. I'll often open a post and the header will load but Reddit will fail to load the comments with a click to retry loading comments.

This has literally never happened to me. I started using it almost daily 3 years ago.

You can't be using Reddit very often if you think these are a relic from 10+ years ago. I would say I experience a Reddit outage at least weekly. My friends and I have a running joke about how often it's down.

The official Reddit Status Twitter account proves that it happens very, very regularly: https://twitter.com/redditstatus

To be clear: You mean you have timeouts and failures using Reddit's own "new and improved" web UI and mobile client? Because using RedReader, old.reddit.com, and other third-party apps, I don't actually recall the last time Reddit didn't load for me.

No, I only ever use old.reddit and BaconReader. I've never used the new UI or the official app.

The official Reddit Status Twitter confirms this is a pretty common occurrence: https://twitter.com/redditstatus

The "elevated error rates" always presents as an "oops, you broke reddit!" landing even on old.reddit. I imagine since it is an "elevated error rate" rather than a total outage that it might be localized to geo or some other kind of shard. I'm on the US West Coast, though, so I can't imagine I'm in a minority.

(Which is confirmed by the number of people responding to GP.)

Well, BaconReader is likely dead at the end of the month with their API changes (along with Apollo, Sync, Reddit Is Fun, etc.)

Little late, but I think I see how we have such different experiences. Assuming other comments are right, and Reddit's pulling pretty much entirely from cache, you probably just scroll longer than I do - long enough to run out of the first ~1000 (cached) posts, and hit uncached items.

You'd get timeouts, and I'd never see them - despite being West Coast (Canada) as well. Or at least, that's my best guess so far.

Cache is probably a good guess. I don't do infinite scrolls but I do use Reddit mostly for hobby subreddits which aren't as popular and less likely to be in cache.

I imagine it probably has some to do with specific geography as well. Cloudflare will proxy back to nearest node and maybe some are better than others.

E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/11xx5o0/you_brok...

I use reddit daily, am constantly refreshing certain subreddits. Fwiw I use new reddit but I have all fancy settings disabled so it looks and works like old.reddit. I also use the iOS app daily. I’m also on the US West coast fwiw. And no reddit premium or anything like that. I literally never have outages or “You broke reddit” or stuff like that.

Edit: I wonder if it’s because all the subreddits I’m on are low or medium traffic. I’ve unsubscribed from the front page and /r/all and tend to only read niche subs.

Yeah, I'm also US West Coast and I only ever use old.reddit or BaconReader. The Reddit Status Twitter and number of people responding to you confirm this isn't an isolated incident, though.

Your reddit status link is showing outages about twice monthly fwiw.

But yeah clearly others have a different experience with this. I wonder why.

Sure, twice monthly is a lot more than "not for 10+ years"!.

Anecdotally I think it's more and that the threshold for "errors above normal" is probably set pretty high. It feels like their infrastructure isn't very reliable and depending on which backend Cloudflare is routing you to, YMMV.

Semi-frequently, I see outages that go unreported on the status page. They used to have error rate and backlog depth graphs on their status page too so it was obvious (in a good, transparent way) when they were having issues even if a human hadn't (yet) updated the status page, but those graphs were removed.

I see outages browsing Reddit almost daily - either the “can’t reach cdn” error or the generic “you broke it” error.

I always just assume the uptimes absolute dogshit.

I see those every now and again but it's usually a one-off, it'll load properly after a refresh. This time it was down or extremely slow for 10-15 minutes which is definitely uncommon.

It's still weekly, the outages just don't last as long.

Source: I'm finally breaking a 13 year Reddit addiction.

I see stuff like that all the time. It feels pretty common to me.

I use Reddit daily and I get the outages pretty frequently (twice a month?)... From Brazil.

Does it? I usually use Reddit on my lunch about this time every day and I can't remember the last time it was down.

I run into issues on occasion, usually with loading comments. I use the web interface.

Interestingly, HN is being really slow for me right now and also gave an error when I first loaded it. Maybe something more global is going on, like network or cdn issues?

I'm also seeing HN being sluggish. But I have crap Australian internet so YMMV.

It is sluggish and throwing some errors. I have a 1Gbps internet connection via fibre in Sweden, so definitely it's not an issue with your connection.

I have a gigabit internet, am in Eastern Europe, most US services have 40ms or so latency -- pretty strong link.

I had to reload this page 5 page until I was allowed to post a reply. Something is definitely going on.

Me too on the HN issues. East Coast US here

Same thing here, Western Europe on a 500Mbps connection. Maybe higher traffic from people looking for Reddit alternatives?

Or some of the people who would use reddit right now came here. I usually read hacker news when I try to reach reddit and it is down.

Presumably you are using old.reddit.com

outages are incredibly common everywhere

But this time it's different because most high traffic subs have already gone dark, so the traffic must be minimal as there will be very few posters relative to what the server can handle. And yet, I'm getting "You broke reddit" when I try to visit which is quite ironical.

Probably a massive shift of traffic to still open subs. That'd probably take it down due to caches suddenly having all the wrong data. No inside info, though.

HN seems to be groaning under the load too and might go down with Reddit.

Maybe it's expensive to generate the 403 for a private subreddit.

A place I once worked had a 404 handler that was extremely expensive, but nobody noticed for a while because 404s are relatively rare. One time a vulnerability scanner took down the site because it was just hitting known vulnerability paths which all 404'd. The code that executed during a 404 was n^2.

As long as n=1 it‘s no problem :-)

That's exactly why the problem didn't reveal itself for a while :)

80% of requests to Reddit via their web UI are basically 500s or CDN errors.

Hyperbolic I know, but that’s what it feels like.

I've been a long-time user of Reddit (I still remember when WSB had only 12m users) and I can't remember an outage.

Probably DDoS more likely today

Did they DDoS themselves trying to fake numbers to show that the blackout has no effect on daily active user counts?

That would be funny

Reddit definitely doesn’t have outages like this almost weekly. Maybe ten+ years ago, but it’s rare now.

No, it doesn't

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