Reddit gets downvoted as site takes a Wednesday tumble

Pit of the internet Reddit is TITSUP* just in time to ruin the lunchtime surfing of Europeans and the morning smoothie-quaffing of Americans.

For those who have never encountered the discussion site, it covers a variety of topics (or "subreddits") into which text posts, images and links are placed. Members can then "up" or "downvote" submissions, with the most popular rising to the top of their subreddit and even as far as the front page. Calling it a moderation challenge would be an understatement.

But not today.

The howls of anguish can be heard echoing even within the hallowed halls of the WeWork where Vulture Central is located.

Problems kicked off at around 1200 UTC as www.reddit.com collapsed into a heap. The outfit's status page reported a "Major Outage". The older version of the website could also be accessed by heading to old.reddit.com, but we found that the iOS app version, at least, was also toasted to a crisp.

Reddit users took to Twitter to express their feelings. Just like Twitter users run riot on Reddit when the bird has stopped tweeting.

#reddit right now pic.twitter.com/a11M7gb3LP

— Mirontus (@mirontus) February 19, 2020

God help us when both of the services drop over. Those cat memes aren't going to post themselves.

We've asked Reddit why the new site has fallen over (while the old one still seems to be accessible) but the company has yet to respond.

In the meantime, perhaps postpone that lunchbreak or defer that morning croissant until the web's second greatest source of prevarication comes back online...

The first? We're far too modest to say. ®

* Total Inability To Serve Up Posts

Bootnote

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Updated 19 February 13:38

And it's back. The good news is that the world's economy enjoyed a 90-minute boost today. We did it, Reddit!