Is Reddit down? Here’s how to check on your phone or PC
Wasting time online is a facet of modern life. In years past, if we wanted to let our brains idle and disengage from the world for a bit, we would mindlessly flip through the dozens of channels available on basic cable. Today, that need is filled by ourtop-tier Chromebooksvia services like TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. But what happens if you can’t connect to your favorite service? How do you know if it’s your internet or local network with a problem or if Reddit is down?
Check yourself
Before you do anything else, see if you can connect to another website. Try to connect to Google, Amazon, or another large site. If you can’t connect to any other websites, Reddit may be fine, but you might want to contact your ISP, troubleshoot your home network, or make sure you’re not in Airplane Mode.
I can’t connect to Reddit. Should I panic now or later?
If you may connect to YouTube but can’t connect to Reddit, it’s time to put on your deerstalker hat and investigate. Start by sending a ping to the website. A ping sends a message over the internet from your computer to another computer and asks for a reply. You can ping a website if your computer is connected to the web, but you’ll need to open the terminal first.
There are many ways to get to the Windows terminal. Using the search box in the taskbar is the easiest.
This opens a window that looks like the old DOS interface you may fondly remember.
Like on Windows, there’s more than one way to get to the terminal on Mac. This way is similar to the Windows method above.
Once the command prompt/terminal opens, typeping reddit.cominto the window. Your computer sends a small amount of information to Reddit, asking for a response. If Reddit is available, you’ll get a reply along with the time it took to receive the response in milliseconds. Typically, your computer sends a few pings (Windows defaults to four) and calculates the average time to account for any outliers. If Reddit is offline, you’ll receive a message that says something like “Request timed out.”
We mention this old-school method of checking a website’s availability because this is what websites that check for service interruptions use. Our favorite page for checking websites isDowndetector. It actively scans social media for reports of outages and relies on a global network of servers to accurately determine the scope of the issue.
Downdetector and similar services can only tell if a website is online. To find more information, navigate toReddit Statusor theirTwitter feedwhich tells if Reddit is down and why it’s down. In contrast to Downdetector, you could’t see where Reddit is down. However, you can see the status of its content delivery networks around the world and a record of any outages or technical hiccups in the recent past.
When all else fails
If this is too much for you, and you’re not keen on remembering a new website only to check the status of another, use social media. Whenever a major social media network goes down, its users flock to another to complain about it, particularly Twitter. If Twitter goes down, you’re out of luck and may as welldelete your accountor go outside at that point.
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