Reddit Error 503: Are The Servers Down, Not Working?

UPDATE: 3:53 p.m. EST - Reddit suffered another server outage on Thursday afternoon. The status page was updated at 3:29 p.m. EST to say that there was an increased error rate. Users were receiving "error 503" messages upon visiting the site just as they had on Wednesday as well.

Original story:

Popular discussion website Reddit experienced technical difficulties Wednesday, as the site was down twice in the day.

The social news aggregation site had suffered an outage earlier in the day and was having issues again in the afternoon. Users started reporting the outage on the website Down Detector and were taking their complaints to Twitter as well.

Many of the reports on Down Detector were coming from the United States, especially along the East Coast, the map of reports showed. Thousands of reports had poured in following the morning outage and even more were appearing during the second outage.

The official Twitter account for Reddit did not post anything about either outage as of 2:30 p.m. EST. But plenty of Reddit users were posting on Twitter about the issues.

People were really struggling without the site.

Users trying to load the website were getting an error message that read, "All of our servers are busy right now, please try again in a minute (error code 503)."

A message was posted to a Reddit status website at 2:34 p.m. EST that said the site was investigating the issue of "elevated error rates." Then at 3:07 p.m. a second message was posted that said "The incident has been resolved." The website appeared to be back up and running at that time and users were posting to Twitter to alert one another.

It was unclear what had caused the afternoon outage or the one that had happened a few hours earlier on Wednesday. International Business Times reached out to Reddit about the outage but had not received a response by the time that this article was published.