Some fool thinks it's a good idea to DDoS Reddit today to make a point.
Some Reddit admin thinks it's a good idea to take it offline deliberately to make a point.
The general public are hugging it to death out of curiosity about the protest.
Unrelated outage. Outages happen, sometimes even on the same day as other things.

[–] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Using Occam's Razor, I'd bet on the last option.

[–] ghoonrhed@aussie.zone 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You'd be right. https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

[–] Album@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit uses AWS, not cloudflare.

[–] andrew@radiation.party 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cloudflare is a reverse proxy service, many services are hosted through Cloudflare on other hosting providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, DO, etc.

Reddit appears to use Fastly, but I could be wrong there. They used to use Cloudflare in combination with the rest of their infra

[–] Album@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Agreed, they use fastly.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

Or the third.

[–] nodsocket@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's a false flag operation so reddit admins can claim they were attacked and take legal action against the protesters.

[–] BlackCoffee@fedia.io 15 points 1 year ago

r/conspiracy licking their lips right now.

[–] LecternCistern@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Slow down there Alex Jones...

[–] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Spez seems like the type of scumbag to do just that. Occam's Razor still applies, of course, but I don't think that's crazy out of character for him.

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 9 points 1 year ago

@nodsocket It's a special de-blackoutisation operation through their own blackout.

@fubo

[–] neal@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Or they took it offline to "hide" all the blacked out subreddits. Some had images about the third party apps as their only post, which was on the front page. By going offline it makes it seem like more of a technical issue rather than a protest.

[–] main_water@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I’d guess that with so many top subs going dark, the mixing algorithm needs to dig deeper and it’s not tuned for that. These algorithms are hard to get right at Reddit’s scale.

As an example to populate the frontpage or /r/all it might would need to scan all posts from the private subs before even getting a sizeable amount of candidate posts from the public ones to rank. Then the public subs won’t be in cache nor will caching help as much on those long tail subreddits. Not being in cache means more hits to the DB and that’s going to affect nearly all requests to Reddit.

[–] ericjmorey@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

It could be that their infrastructure is set up to optimize showing data on the typically most popular subreddits.