It’s no secret that Reddit has been running slow and has had its intermittent downtime for a while now. Today, the problem seems to be worse than normal and Amazon is getting the blame.
According to the Amazon Web Services Service Health Dashboard, everything is green lit.
Fortunately, it seems to be getting better with each refresh but nothing has been posted with information regarding the culprit or how Amazon was at fault here.
Update: Reddit has posted up a long, technical article on their blog of why they were down and how Amazon deserves the blame. As Jacob pointed out in the comments, it did have to do with the limited latency issues Amazon posted on their Health dashboard. Perhaps that shouldn’t have been a green node by Amazon but they probably didn’t want to take the hit in their statistics. Here’s just the TL;DR from Reddit’s blog:
Yes, the site was down for two separate, long periods of time today. The downtime was catalyzed by an outage with Amazon’s EBS service. Jedberg, spladug, and myself are working hard to prevent future issues. We take great pride in the site, and whenever it goes down it seriously hurts for us, as much as it hurts the community.