Reddit recently experienced a major global outage that prevented users worldwide from accessing the platform’s websites and mobile apps. During the outage, users encountered various error messages, including “502 Bad Gateway” and “Unknown server error” on the website, along with mobile-specific errors like “Error: Choose failed Missing field ‘user_id’.” The issues caused significant disruption, as highlighted by user reports on Downdetector.com and complaints across social media platforms.
The company quickly acknowledged the problem, with Reddit’s official status page indicating elevated error rates across many frontends. The incident report described the issue as stemming from a backend problem that impacted many users on the site. Reddit’s engineering team promptly began investigating the root cause, which preliminary findings suggested might be related to DNS or web server configuration issues.
This was not the first time Reddit had faced such a widespread disruption. The platform experienced similar massive outages in the past, including one on April 12, 2023, and another a month earlier on March 14, disrupting access to Reddit’s website and mobile apps on both occasions. These historical incidents underscore the challenges Reddit has faced in maintaining consistent service for its user base.
Fortunately, the latest outage was resolved swiftly with Reddit identifying and fixing the issue by April 25, 13:26 EDT. After deploying a fix and bringing its servers back online, Reddit moved into a monitoring phase to ensure stability and prevent future occurrences. This prompt response helped to minimize the duration of the outage and restore access for users, thereby mitigating potential longer-term impacts on user trust and platform reliability.
