According to Windows Report | Error-free Tech Life, Reddit suffered its second consecutive day of significant outages on December 9, 2024. In the early hours, over 22,000 users reported problems on Downdetector, primarily with the website and server connections. This followed a widespread global outage the previous day, December 8, which impacted the Reddit website, mobile app, and basic server access for many users. The platform’s own status page reportedly understated the issue compared to third-party outage trackers. These back-to-back disruptions represent a streak of downtime the social media site hasn’t experienced in quite some time, leaving a visibly annoyed user base venting on other social channels.
Reddit’s Rough Patch
So, what’s going on over there? Two major outages in a row isn’t just bad luck; it points to something deeper in the infrastructure. Maybe it’s a cascading failure from yesterday’s fix, or perhaps they’re pushing through a backend update that’s not going smoothly. Here’s the thing: when Downdetector lights up and your own status page is quiet, that’s a communications problem on top of a technical one. Users get doubly frustrated. They can’t access the site, and they don’t trust the official channel telling them everything’s fine. For a community-driven platform built on real-time interaction, this kind of reliability hit really stings. How many conversations just… evaporated?
2025: The Year The Web Stumbled
But let’s zoom out. Reddit’s bad week is part of a much, much bigger story for 2025. This has basically been the year of the mega-outage. We’ve seen Cloudflare go down twice, crippling huge chunks of the internet. Remember the massive AWS outage that took out Fortnite, Slack, Canva, and even Amazon itself across 60 countries? And Microsoft’s eight-hour marathon where Teams, Outlook, and Xbox Live all went dark? It’s a pattern. Our digital world is built on a shockingly small number of foundational tech giants, and when one of them sneezes, everyone gets a cold. The interdependency is the real story. Reddit going down is annoying. The underlying architecture of the modern internet showing its fragility? That’s concerning.
Where Do We Go From Here?
This trend raises huge questions about resilience and redundancy. For businesses, it’s a stark reminder that putting all your eggs in one cloud provider’s basket is a massive risk. We’re talking about real financial loss and shattered user trust every time these events happen. For users, it’s a weird powerlessness. Your work, your entertainment, your social life—it can all just vanish because of a bug thousands of miles away in a data center you’ll never see. The pressure is now on these tech behemoths to explain not just what broke, but how they’re going to prevent this domino effect in the future. Because honestly, hasn’t 2025 given us enough downtime déjà vu already?
