Reddit appeared to suffer a service disruption on Friday evening (December 19), with tens of thousands of users in the United States reporting problems accessing the platform.
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector, complaints began to spike around 4:00 PM EST, suggesting a significant interruption to Reddit’s services.
Tens of thousands report issues
At the peak of the disruption, more than 40,000 users had logged complaints on Downdetector. The data indicates that most users were affected on mobile, with 53% reporting problems with the Reddit app.
Meanwhile, 37% of users said they were facing issues on the website, while 10% reported server connection problems. Users took to social media platforms such as X to share their frustration, with many saying feeds were failing to load or posts were not displaying correctly.
Video posts issue flagged earlier
Earlier in the day, Reddit’s official status account on X acknowledged a separate issue related to video content. In a post, the company said it was investigating reports that video posts were appearing as static images instead of playing normally.
It remains unclear whether the earlier video-related issue was connected to the wider disruption reported later in the evening.
Official status page shows no active incidents
Reddit’s official service status page currently shows “No incidents reported today.”
Social media reactions
Frustrated users quickly turned to social media to voice their concerns as the outage unfolded. Several posts on X questioned whether the platform was down, with users sharing screenshots of error messages and failed refresh attempts.
An X user by the handle of @roukia89 tweeted, “Never seen Reddit down before. I wonder what happened to make it crash like this.”
Another user commented, “Everyone rushing to twitter to see if reddit is down for anyone else.”
Speculation also surfaced alongside frustration. An X user by the handle @timmy_turnes wrote, “They just shut down the site so Epstein’s photos wouldn’t get out 😏 I saved the 5 most interesting photos from https://old.reddit.com
In a similar vein, another X user posted, “Epstein files dropped and Reddit is down.”
To recall, Downdetector data showed that Reddit experienced a global outage on 8 December, when more than 250 user complaints were logged around 3.55PM. At the time, 48% of users reported issues with the Reddit website, while around 42% flagged problems with the Reddit app. The remaining 10% said they were facing server connection issues.
