Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 696 posts

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#161

Post by LeifCarrotson »

happytiger wrote: post #121

I’d imagine it’s the massive number of user delete requests of people wiping their accounts in protest.

Certainly an abnormal usage pattern - I've personally tried a handful of backup and delete scripts, and have been waking up a lot of cold storage today.

But how many many non-cached requests does it take to overwhelm the servers? Obviously scraping my comments page for years-old data is going to hit the backend hard and isn't going to have a traffic pattern at all like the front page of my subscriptions, but I'd assume that they had far more capacity available than would be required to handle that. The number of people currently running a Greasemonkey or Python script against the archive is higher than it's ever been, but it has to be a miniscule, infinitesimal fraction of their normal traffic - right?

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#163

Post by chomp »

skhr0680 wrote: post #36
r0bbbo wrote: post #6

Lots of speculation on Twitter about this—a failed attempt to re-open all closed subreddits and instate their own moderators. I can't imagine it'd be that, although I do enjoy the conspiracy, and more likely they were using the window of reduced traffic to make some larger changes and they went awry

A meme pointing out that u/spez was a mod of r/jailbait in 2008 was the top post on r/all a few hours ago

This isn't that surprising, you used to be able to add anyone on the entire site as a moderator and it'd autoaccept. It's doubtful he actually moderated it in any capacity. He's still moderator of some random subreddits.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#164

Post by turtleyacht »

archon wrote: post #130

Pure speculation: With so many subs now private, they're hitting a performance wall searching for enough content to fill the front page. If I'm logged in and go to the site root, it throws an error. If logged out, it works. If I go to a specific (not privatized) sub, it works.

Yeah :) Front page was a for loop and too many subreddits went dark

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#165

Post by tenpies »

tsunamifury wrote: post #84

Reddit being gone for a while actually makes me feel like the world is a better place. Somehow knowing even for a brief moment no one is there and I’m not missing out on anything makes me feel… more alive and excited to interact with the world. sounds bizarre I know… but I wish more social media shut down now.

[flagged]

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#166

Post by gyanreyer »

rockbruno wrote: post #10

HN is also really slow, this could be a wider-spread backend issue like when that one CDN took down half of the internet with it.

I was just looking at the documentation site for VSCode extensions and it was absolutely C R A W L I N G. As much as I love to clown on VSCode being slow, it definitely feels like I'm starting to see a pattern of degraded performance for a lot of sites.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#167

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

leetharris wrote: post #59

[flagged]

> Reddit is not profitable.

Seems like entirely through bad management. The choices made, from mostly serving links and text to hosting image and video which ballooned operating costs to expanding their workforce from 700 to 2000 while having no proyect worth putting that many people to work on.

> Reddit finally finds a way to possibly become profitable

Says who? Their API changes would not make them profitable. The changes, price and timeline show that the intent is to kill 3rd party ecosystem, not profitability.

> scumbags focused on profit?

Reddit is the only social media that has unpaid mods. Facebook pays people to keep conversation civil, reddit wants you to do that work for free while they release NFT profile pics.

people are not angry at reddit for wanting to be profitable, people are angry because there have been 10 years of mismanagement, 0 mod support, aggresive anti user choices and the few tools that people use to make the website not want to pluck your eyes out being pulled under them with 0 recourse

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#168

Post by samstave »

kshacker wrote: post #92

What I am presenting below is a joke. Their counts went way low so the monitoring said something is odd a drop of 50% is quite abnormal and failed them over. Same story on the other side. Now they are trying to change the thresholds to say that do not alert or fail over on these thresholds. But while they were doing that they got their EKS bill and they realized they can make / save more money just by being down.

https://xkcd.com/806/

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#169

Post by leetcrew »

Veliladon wrote: post #50

Checking the default list against the private list is usually an O(1) because none of them are on the private list. Now almost all of them are. It's going from O(1) to basically O(n^2) worst case. For millions of users. I wonder why Reddit is down?

this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. do you have some archetectural insight, or just guessing?

fetching a list of default/subscribed subs and comparing it against the whole list of private subs every time someone loads your homepage sounds like a pretty bad design. why wouldn't something as fundamental as a private/public flag be stored in the main db entry for the subreddit?

either way, this doesn't seem like a probable root cause. checking a list of default subs against the list of private subs would be expensive under any circumstances. having all the default subs added to the private list wouldn't really change the already terrible performance by much. there just aren't that many default subs to begin with.

Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage

#170

Post by memetomancer »

So... I visited Reddit before coming here and finding the HN thread...

Most of the site is rebelling, but I took the time to visit, intending to give them impressions, just to see how they are holding up. And of course they aren't really holding up as we can see.

But their handling is unbelievably tone deaf - I was greeted by the message that I broke Reddit. They gave me the grade of 'F'. I refreshed the page and they showed me a cartoon corpse.

I get that it's a tongue-in-cheek leftover from happier times, but considering the circumstances it sure came off as hostility aimed at the few people willing to give them a chance on this dark day.

I mean, I was really just rubbernecking... so maybe i deserved it for my schadenfreude, but still. It is casual hostility directed at the source of their user generated content. It's not in good taste. But I suspect it would never occur to the entitled mindset of their leadership.

Post reply on HN