Reddit starts crashing as subreddit blackout keeps growing

Reddit is experiencing some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms. For many Verge staffers, Reddit.com isn’t loading, but some subreddits will. There are around 40,000 user reports of issues on Downdetector.

Reddit’s status page is now reporting a “major outage” affecting Reddit’s desktop and mobile sites and its native mobile apps. “We’re aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible,” the company wrote on the status page.

More than 7,000 subreddits have gone private or read-only in response to the API pricing terms, which is forcing the developers of apps like Apollo for Reddit to shut down at the end of the month. (If the tracking links in my previous paragraph don’t work, try this one.) The new pricing will potentially be prohibitively expensive for developers, with Apollo for Reddit creator Christian Selig saying that he would have to pay more than $20 million per year to operate the app. Many subreddits are going dark for 48 hours, from June 12th through June 14th, but some have chosen to stay private indefinitely until something changes at Reddit.