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Do you have data on reddit's downtime to backup your claim? https://twitter.com/redditstatus shows the last downtime was on April 9th, and that was scheduled.

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That must be for major site-wide downtime — anyone who frequently uses Reddit knows that a few times per week you'll see a funny little "You broke Reddit" cartoon instead of the page you were trying to load. The problem usually resolves in a matter of seconds, a minute or two at most, so it's not a big deal, and I don't believe these micro-outages are universal (i.e., I think it only happens to a subset of people viewing certain subreddits / hitting particular servers / etc.).

I don't think this necessarily means Reddit has crappy engineering. It could be they've just realized that 99.9999% success at serving pages is not a worthwhile goal. I mean, it's Reddit, it's not air traffic control — nobody's going to be hurt if they have to wait 90 seconds to see random crap on Reddit.

usually 500 errors (assuming the "You broke Reddit" is a 500) are not considered downtime. They are bugs and need to be addressed.

They are intermittent 500s, which point to performance issues.

http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2hieim/when_t...

http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2hyyhu/when_t...

From 5 days ago and last night, respectively. alienth disowns the threads after the downtime is complete so there's no solid record I can refer to (these are just posts I happened to be around for).

I visit reddit a lot. Besides the "You broke reddit" message mentioned by ColinCera there's a page with a blue background that says reddit is down. Pretty sure I saw it in this week if not the last 24 hours.

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