Reddit down after millions face ‘connection error’

A Reddit outage has reportedly left millions of users in the US, Australia and elsewhere facing a ‘connection error’.

The message board-style social media platform went down just before 3pm ET on Wednesday, according to Downdetector.

At around 3.30pm, there were more than 47,000 reports of outages, Downdetector showed.

Many reddit users trying to use the application got a message that read, ‘upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection failure’, NBC New York reported.

It was not immediately clear which countries were affected, but the Daily Mail reported that millions of Australians were frustrated with the outage.

Shortly before 4pm ET, Reddit wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in response to a question on it being down: ‘Yes. We’re working on it.’

A Reddit spokesman acknowledged the issue around 4.45pm and told The New York Times: ‘A fix is in place and we’re ramping back up.’

After the peak of around 47,000 outages, the numbers started to taper off but hiked up again at around 5.20pm when there were some 32,000 outages, Downdetector showed.

Just before 8pm, there were around 400 reports of outages, and the issue seemed to be on its way to being resolved.

Reddit told CBS News: ‘There was a bug in a recent update we made, but a fix is in place and we’re ramping back up.’

The San Francisco-based company has consistently ranked in the top 10 for most used websites in the world. Earlier this year, Reddit reported having 73million daily users.

It is not the only recent outage the site has suffered.

On Election Day this year, Reddit was looking into ‘degraded performance’ and resolved the issues after hours.

Reddit went public in March, and in October reported it was profitable for the first time since becoming a publicly traded company.

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