seems unlikely (to me) that this would be intentional from reddit’s side. You’d think they would be VERY interested to see how this really impacts site traffic and how much “protest” they can absorb before taking administrative action against mods/subreddits.
Given the degree of … social awareness… They’ve displayed, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if someone at Reddit simply thought “this is the perfect time for maintenance!” and they ran with it 😂