https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/api-pricing-protests-caused-reddit-to-crash-for-3-hours/
Thousands of subreddits going dark broke Reddit's website, mobile app.
A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.
How in the world does setting a bunch of subs to private crash the website?
honestly I figured it'd be the result of all those people running deletion scripts on their accounts
High-scale software is complex, sometimes there are edge cases where weird unexpected stuff happens. This isn’t a situation they would normally run into.
It absolutely is something they would normally run into. I work on maintaining a massive application; think 60+ teams of 6, each extremely specialized and minimal overlap. Almost 75% of my job is predicting issues and avoiding them. Peer testing draws on this a ton as well. They just continue to plainly show that they don't care. Time and time again, year after year, they continue to have the exact same issues and do fuck all about it.
I saw a lot of people saying they used bots to rewrite their entire post history to things like "fuck /u/spez"
I'm thinking that amount of comment editing might be quite the spike on the servers.