Even the CBC is making an article about it! 😅
The blackout also was also the cause behind a general Reddit outage this morning, during which all content on the site was inaccessible — a Reddit spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that “a significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues.”
Any guesses on why switching things private might cause predictable issues? Wouldn’t that be easier than loading the content? Plus it would discourage further browsing.
I’m guessing a lot of them all at once requires all the various CDN caches to be refreshed, so higher load on the database(s)
I saw someone speculate elsewhere that it could be that some high-profile subreddits were hard-coded for the front page, and them going private could have crashed the system. That would be a bad implementation, but is a reasonable explanation for why everything stopped working.
Im surprised that the big ticket subreddits, of which there are only a handful, are yet publicly moderated. Tbh I do forsee them changing ownership of these 20 odd subreddits and getting to a point where your average joe cant tell a blackout is occuring. Whether they can maintain the standards is up for debate however.
