Reddit crashed briefly on Monday after users shut down thousands of subreddits to protest new charges to developers, who said the fees would make the platform less accessible to users on mobile devices.
About 3,489 subreddits went dark for 48 hours starting Monday, according to BBC. As of May 2022, there were 3.5 million subreddits, according to Front Page Metrics. Third party apps give Reddit users access to the platform on their phones without having to use the official site or app. In late May, the company announced that it will start charging such apps as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync and ReddPlanet to use its data, according to press reports.
The company estimates the new charges will amount to less than $1.00 per user per month for a typical Reddit third-party app.
The #RedditBlackout hashtag started trending on Twitter after the blackout began, with more than 4,238 tweets associated with the term as of Monday. Reddit was trending with more than 112,000 searches on the social media platform. Twitter users as early as 9 a.m. noticed that Reddit was experiencing technical issues. One user’s tweet about the Reddit outage received more than 80,000 views within an hour. “Nice to see even Reddit itself getting in on the Reddit Blackout today,” the user wrote.
