The company's contentious plan to kill off third-party apps was met with widespread opposition as thousands of Reddit communities went dark in protest.

Reddit acknowledged the outage was caused by a planned protest against its new policy while speaking with reporters. According to user reports, issues started to appear on Reddit.com around 10:25 a.m. EDT.

Reddit's Status page still stated that all systems were operational despite the flood of reports of the website and homepage not loading. The status page was later modified to reflect the outage, though.

Reddit stated that it was aware of the problems with content loading and was working to resolve them. On the status page, neither the cause nor the anticipated time of resolution was given.

The planned protest, which resulted in several Reddit communities, or subreddits, turning private all at once, was confirmed as the cause of the outage by a Reddit representative.

A Reddit spokesperson, Tim Rathschmidt, explained that a sizable number of subreddits going private led to some expected stability issues and that they have been working to fix the issue.

In one of the site's largest protests to date, thousands of subreddits had been preparing to go dark on June 12th, 2023. The company's new API pricing policy is in question; it will drive up developer costs to the point where those running independent Reddit apps will largely have to shut down their operations.