“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.

So... According to Reddit the blackout is the culprit, I guess?

So either it's just an outage and they're faulting the blackout, or the blackout is actually the culprit. Either way I hope this works. However, I'm still not going back to Reddit even if they fix and reverse everything.

[–] Darnov@lemmy.world 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by idiocy. It is entirely plausible that their algorithm couldn't handle the most popular subreddits going dark all at once. They likely hard-relegated so many other subs that would appear on r/popular or r/all to lower priority and thus when the higher priority subs disappeared, it couldn't change priorities and cause the crash.

[–] thal3s@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is absolutely the most likely scenario.

[–] intelati@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

And it's also fucking hilarious.😂😂

[–] PrometheusG@lemmy.one 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder if it's bots or something trying to access the now dark subreddits. Essentially causing a DDOS.

[–] god@sh.itjust.works 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

well if i made a bot, hmm, yeah that could cause it lol. Like if i tell it "go in every 30 minutes & steal the top 20 posts", and it's down, i'd just say "retry till u get it, idc if u DoS that shit" and well if many ppl do it, it's a free DDoS courtesy of robotland

[–] fing3r@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I bet thats whats happening.

[–] god@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 year ago

if that's what's happening, i feel a sense of fellowship for those ppl who don't give a shit and will ddos a website just to try and steal some memes, truly conoisseurs of 🅱️est 🅱️ractices 😎

[–] armcie@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

When a major sub goes private, that's an awful lot of posts and comments that they have to hide from the rest of the internet. I'm not surprised there's some excess load on their systems with lots of them doing it at once.

[–] anas@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's going to be the excuse, huh

"We have a duty to keep the site running"

[–] god@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

and when their plot is discovered

"some sacrifices must be made, we killed it so we could keep it alive!"