Reddit experienced an outage due to an issue in its hosting provider, AWS

On Saturday, Reddit status notified its users on Twitter that they are suffering an outage due to “elevated level of errors” at 06.09 PDT. During this time, users across U.S. East Coast and Northern Europe could not load the Reddit page.

Bleeping computer reported that users from Europe (Finland, Spain, Italy, Portugal), Canada, the Philippines, and Australia faced trouble while loading the website. Downdetector.com registered a peak of almost 15,000 Reddit down reports on this particular day.

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Image Source: Bleeping computer

Twitter was flooded with user messages questioning the status of Reddit.

https://twitter.com/Majesti20934027/status/1167788217216765952

https://twitter.com/whoisanthracite/status/1167786716121509888

https://twitter.com/Blade67470/status/1167788111998390272

After some time at 07:53 PDT, Reddit tweeted that they have identified the issue behind the outage.

https://twitter.com/redditstatus/status/1167812712262295552

Meanwhile, users trying to open any page on Reddit received messages that said, “Sorry, we couldn’t load posts for this page.” or “Sorry, for some reason Reddit can’t be reached.”

Read Also: Reddit’s 2018 Transparency report includes copyright removals, restorations, and more!

Finally, the outage was resolved at 12:36 PDT on the same day. Reddit tweeted, “Resolved: This incident has been resolved.” No further details have been posted by Reddit or AWS.

Reddit status page reported that the Amazon AWS issue affected seven Reddit.com components including Desktop Web, Mobile Web, Native Mobile Apps, Vote Processing, Comment Processing, Spam Processing, and Modmail.

A user commented on Bleeping computer’s post,“Looks like Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Relational Database Service (RDS) (and Workspaces, whatever that is) took a hit for US-EAST-1 at that time. From the status updates, maybe due to a big hardware failure.

Perhaps Reddit has realized there is value in keeping a redundant stack running in a western region. They could have instantly mitigated the outage by flipping traffic with Route 53 to the healthy stack in this case.”