Enlarge (credit: Tim Goode/PA Images via Getty Images)
It took less than 11 hours for Reddit to feel the impact of widespread protests of its API fees. Over 7,000 subreddits became private in order to “go dark” and resist Reddit’s controversial API pricing hike, which caused some instability for the site, and it was down from about 10:25 am ET to 1:26 pm today.
Amid the outage, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told The Verge:
A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.
As of this writing, 7,856 subreddits have joined the protest, according to a counter on Twitch, and 8,191 have said they will do so. Some of the subreddits going dark have tens of millions of subscribers. But with the outage, the protests have already affected users who don’t use a protesting subreddit.
Source : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/api-pricing-protests-caused-reddit-to-crash-for-3-hours/
