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Reddit was down for over two hours

reddit.statuspage.io

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Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#31
post #17
post #12

Reddit is the only major social media/aggregator I can think of that actually has to go offline for scheduled maintenance still. I can’t imagine the kind of shitshow it must be internally. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.

So what? 24/7 builds up to fragility like the NYC subway system or has huge costs. It's social media, not a hospital.

A website is not a subway system. There are no "huge costs" to having basic rolling deployments set up. In fact it's likely more expensive to have extended outages and maintenance windows, because it shows that there are humans running commands behind the scenes rather than automation.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#32
post #16
post #12

Reddit is the only major social media/aggregator I can think of that actually has to go offline for scheduled maintenance still. I can’t imagine the kind of shitshow it must be internally. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.

They also have very frequent cases where the site throws up an error page or is completely unreachable because it is under heavy load. I can't think of another major social network that has those problems on a weekly basis either.

Not recently, but Twitter's "fail whale" became famous due to problems Twitter had under heavy load.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#33
post #30
post #12

Reddit is the only major social media/aggregator I can think of that actually has to go offline for scheduled maintenance still. I can’t imagine the kind of shitshow it must be internally. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.

Can't they run in read-only mode during maintenance? That would be a relatively simple workaround, I suppose.

They used to. Not sure why they don’t now.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#34
post #17
post #12

Reddit is the only major social media/aggregator I can think of that actually has to go offline for scheduled maintenance still. I can’t imagine the kind of shitshow it must be internally. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.

So what? 24/7 builds up to fragility like the NYC subway system or has huge costs. It's social media, not a hospital.

The revenue per minute of these sites is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. While that can be budgeted for if needed, its not just inconvenient for users, it could mean missing a revenue target.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#35
post #27

Y'know, the toll that all this activity takes on Reddit's servers gave me an idea for a sort of distributed Reddit. News links and stories assorted into topic-based groups, with the option for users to comment or respond to others' comments in a threaded discussion. It would be completely decentralized and belong to the users, not some central media company. We could call it Users' Network, or USENET for short. We co…

Sign me up. I’d happily contribute to that as much as I can, whenever my parents aren’t using the phone line.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#36
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re Alexa rank #16 globally - that they’re having trouble monetizing their userbase just means they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

And I wholeheartedly wish Reddit will continue doing what they are doing. As a user, I would vote for scheduled maintenance downtime to many monetization attempts present on other networks.

Looks like they’re having trouble just keeping the lights on without taking VC money.

Not exactly a sustainable plan if you value using their service, and they’ve already got early investors pushing them to monetize.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#37
post #14
post #12

Reddit is the only major social media/aggregator I can think of that actually has to go offline for scheduled maintenance still. I can’t imagine the kind of shitshow it must be internally. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.

they don't make much money so don't have the same redundancy luxuries as other sites

They make a lot more than does the little outfit I work for and we manage it.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#38
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? 24/7 builds up to fragility like the NYC subway system or has huge costs. It's social media, not a hospital.

The revenue per minute of these sites is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. While that can be budgeted for if needed, its not just inconvenient for users, it could mean missing a revenue target.

I don't think Reddit grosses a hundred billion USD per year. Do you? That would put it very close to Microsoft.

Re: Reddit was down for over two hours

#39
post #12

Reddit is the only major social media/aggregator I can think of that actually has to go offline for scheduled maintenance still. I can’t imagine the kind of shitshow it must be internally. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.

Do we know this was scheduled maintenance and not some kind of unexpected outage?
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