It’s really the week for it, isn’t it? First the Census, then the Census again, now this. Reddit, the self-styled front page of the internet, has gone down for “emergency maintenance”, and it doesn’t look like it’ll be back any time soon.
Update: As of 10:20AM, Reddit is back up and running. We now return to your regularly scheduled cat GIFs.
For the last half hour, the usual ugly, text-and-thumbnails-on-a-white-background Reddit.com has been redirecting to the page you see above — a simple GIF with scrolling pixels and a surprisingly happy Snoo — the alien Reddit mascot — with a message saying the site remains down for emergency maintenance. As of 9:15AM, the site has been offline for almost an hour, the first significant outage since late March, when the site was offline for 40 minutes. It’s also the longest outage for over a year.
A Reddit spokesperson told Gizmodo “Reddit is down due to an unexpected issue during routine software upgrades. We are aware of the outage and are working on resolving the issue.”
CurrentlyDown shows the site as offline:
Predictably, Twitter is upset:
#Reddit is down. I… don’t know where to go.
— Frijid (@TeabagTyrant) August 11, 2016
One user suggests the site will be offline for an entire day, although there’s no way at the moment to confirm this. We’ve contacted Reddit for comment.
#Reddit will be down for 24h. Server issues.
— YESNOMAYBE (@theYESNOMAYBE) August 11, 2016
To pass the time, Reddit even sends users to its Github page, where all the site’s open source code is stored. The last commit? A couple of seemingly minor updates to comments on both mobile and desktop, to do with deep (especially long) comment threads and how to handle them, and orphaned comments left over when the parent is deleted. Hey, maybe that’s responsible. [Reddit / GitHub]