No, it wasn’t just you. Reddit appears to have been down for a big chunk of users this morning. And now some people think it happened because of GameStop stock being on the rise again.
Reddit goes down
Instead, Redditors were met with a message stating ‘Our CDN was unable to reach our servers’ with a link out to Reddit Status.
According to Down Detector, reports about the ‘front page of the internet’ experiencing problems began at around 7:30am AEDT.
“We’re currently experiencing issues on web and mobile clients,” the Reddit Status website read.
An earlier message on the site said that Reddit was currently investigating the issue. But the most recent note reads:
“We’ve identified the underlying issue and systems are beginning to recover.”
As of around 8:50am AEDT the site seems to be back up and running.
Reddit confirmed that it had returned to normal operations on Twitter.
“Monitoring: We’ve observed a recovery and our systems are healthy–reddit is operational again,” the Twitter Status account said.
Monitoring: We’ve observed a recovery and our systems are healthy–reddit is operational again. https://t.co/vWGxn4gGIa
— reddit status (@redditstatus) February 24, 2021
This message is also reflected on the Reddit status web page.
Some users are looking at GameStop stock as the reason
Some users took to Twitter to push a conspiracy theory that the outage was due to GameStop stock once again jumping up.
After being down for the last few weeks, the stock is up over 46 per cent since market open today. On top of that, the Federal Reserve’s online transfer systems were down at around the same time as Reddit being offline.
It’s now been restored as well, but it still resulted in people saying all of these events were connected.
“The Federal Reserve bank breaks down, GameStop stock explodes, trading halted, shuts down. I mean, you tell me. I don’t know how it all fits together, but that’s a lot of correlation,” one tweet read.
And the Federal Reserve website is down.
Simultaneously with Reddit being down.
Simultaneously with GME and AMC headed to the moon. pic.twitter.com/NLqbLJ4wl6
— peace is the only way (@peacelovingnj) February 24, 2021
“Either Reddit is trying to protect themselves from being accused of platforming market manipulation. Or, they’ve been ordered to shut down by someone. Trading suddenly halted at the same time. Sus asf,” another read.
This theory is just that, a theory. It also seems unlikely that Reddit would bend to the will of some unknown entity telling them to go offline. Just a couple of weeks ago the company bought a Superbowl ad to celebrate the influence that r/wallstreetbets had on the stock market, particularly GameStop.
Here’s the line the ad ended on:
“Powerful things happen when people rally around something they really care about. And there’s a place for that. It’s called Reddit.”