A community on Reddit known as r/wallstreetbets has apparently crashed the site after it has dominated the news recently over its members stock trades.
Currently, the subreddit has over 3.2 million members of which nearly 800,000 are online and this has apparently crashed the site. When you attempt to load the site, it loads the fail Reddit logo signaling its crash. I’ve also attempted to login to Reddit on the desktop via a browser and it keeps failing over and over again.
When you check out Down Detector, problems at Reddit started around 9:47PM where 58% of people complained about website problems, 34% complained about the app and 7% complained about login issues.
Interesting enough, on mobile, you can still access other subreddits, although that is not a given. You will still get fail signs across the site.
Reddit has been the focus on social media for the past few days thanks to a group of retail investors at wallstreetbets. The community collectively bought large chunks of stock of GameStop, a dying electronics shops, and hold on to the stock due to the fact that huge hedgefunds like Melvin Capital had predicted the share price will fall. The exponential rise of the stock to as high as $300 as of writing this article up from $40 last week as made hedgefunds like Melvin Capital to lose money on the stock.
Reddit’s crash comes at a time when there is a lot of hype on that specific subreddit which has caused waves on the stock market in the United States. Their influence was so great, Melvin Capital decided to close their GameStop position about 8 hours ago. This move has been seen as a pivotal moment where social media communities can be viewed as a huge force in the stock buying market and we will have to see what will happen next.
UPDATE
Seems like Reddit is back after the system wide outage that was experienced for at least an hour.
