No, you didn’t actually break Reddit, but there’s a good chance you’re seeing an error message informing that you did right about now. On Wednesday morning at around 11:52 a.m. ET, Reddit began experiencing a widespread outage. Attempting to load any page on the website redirects visitors to a page letting them know that “reddit broke!” We’re still gathering information, but we are sharing everything we know about why Reddit is down below.
Why is Reddit down?
Shortly after 11:30 a.m. ET on July 16, reports of Reddit outages spiked on Downdetector. At the time of writing, there have been over 72,000 individual reports, indicating that nearly everyone is having trouble accessing Reddit this morning. In other words, it’s not just you. Something broke that is causing problems for anyone who wants to visit Reddit.
Meanwhile, the Reddit Status page was updated at 11:52 a.m. ET to note that the team started “investigating elevated site errors.” As of 12:07 p.m. ET, Reddit said that the staff “identified the cause of the issue and are working to address it.” It’s 12:17 p.m. ET as I write this, and for now, everything seems to be working as expected once again.
Here’s the latest update from the Reddit team as of 12:21 p.m. ET: “A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.”
The incident was fully resolved at 12:38 p.m. ET, and the site is back up and running.
Reddit has had problems before
Outages like these aren’t especially uncommon at Reddit. Looking through its archive of recent incidents, you should expect a short interruption about two to three times a month. For instance, in June, there were two instances of “elevated errors,” each of which were resolved in less than an hour. One involved comments failing to publish on the site.
In fact, there has been at least one incident report every month since 2025 began. Considering that Reddit is one of the 10 most visited sites on the planet, it’s no big surprise that the servers occasionally become overwhelmed by the traffic. That said, it’s no less frustrating for those who are visiting the social news aggregator to continue a conversation, catch up on world events, or seek out firsthand appraisal of a product they’re thinking about buying.
