Reddit is one of the most visited websites in the world, hosting millions of communities and serving as the front page of the internet for many users. When Reddit goes down, the timing is often ironic — users want to post about Reddit being down but cannot reach Reddit to do it.
Is Reddit actually down or is it just you?
Reddit experiences genuine platform-wide outages several times per year. More commonly, certain features degrade — search breaks while browsing works, voting stops registering, or new post submissions fail — while the core site remains accessible.
Check WebsiteDown and enter reddit.com for a live server probe. Reddit also maintains a status page at redditstatus.com. If you can see the site but comments are not loading or the page is stuck spinning, the issue may be with Reddit's API or CDN rather than the core servers.
Reddit's new design vs. old Reddit
Reddit has two front-ends: the default new design (reddit.com) and old Reddit (old.reddit.com), which uses the classic interface. These sometimes fail independently. If the new design is broken, try old.reddit.com — it routes differently and sometimes works when the main site does not.
The Reddit app and the mobile website (m.reddit.com) also run independently and may work when the desktop site does not, or vice versa.
Common Reddit errors
"Whoa there, pardner!" — Reddit's generic error page, shown when their servers are overloaded or encountering errors. Nothing to do except wait and retry.
"Something went wrong" on image or video uploads means Reddit's media processing pipeline is having issues — a common partial failure.
500 or 503 errors on the Reddit API affect third-party apps (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Narwhal) and often occur independently of the main site.
Reddit alternatives during an outage
The communities you follow on Reddit usually have Discord servers as backup gathering places — many subreddits display their Discord invite in the sidebar. Lemmy (lemmy.world) is a federated Reddit alternative that runs on independent infrastructure and is not affected by Reddit's outages.