Pure speculation on my part, but I bet they're getting hugged. Just a good ol' fashion "traffic pattern has changed and now you're being hugged to death," at a

Pure speculation on my part, but I bet they're getting hugged. Just a good ol' fashion "traffic pattern has changed and now you're being hugged to death," at a scale not even Reddit can rapidly address. My guess is it's caused by (but indirectly) the Reddit Strike. Here's the thing: because Reddit doesn't require you to be logged in to see posts in most subreddits (especially the most popular ones), having those subs go private has caused a bunch of poorly-maintained automated infrastructure to hit its barely-tested retry/fallback code. How many repeater / archiver bots for subreddits are out there? Who knows. So now a bunch of bespoke, heterogeneous bots are saying "Oh, I got a nonstandard response from that page... Probably a transient issue, I'll try again in 30 seconds with no backoff. And of course, I'm faking my thumbprint to just look like a regular Chrome instance so I don't trip the bog-standard bot detection that'd stop me from doing what my creator wants me to do." So I bet Reddit admins woke up today to a firestorm of continuously-failed-retried queries and they're having to figure out how to separate wheat from chaff in realtime. A related, but different, potential explanation: Reddit never had to test at scale the performance of bouncing users from private subreddits and it turns out that query is itself expensive for some reason that didn't come up in small-scale testing, so now Reddit's own infrastructure is setting itself aflame as the world is waking up, pinging the most popular subreddits, and triggering a near-query-of-death every time they do it.