How do you know? Someone else posited the theory that the frontpage service has to search for posts for too long due to the blackout. How do you prove this is not the case?

Can't prove it's not aliens.

Another sibling comment was added 2 minutes ago, where Reddit themselves state that the blackout is the cause:

> According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.

Maybe you should think a bit harder about the difference between "this thing that is actively happening could be the cause" and "aliens could be the cause"?

If they anticipated it, why did it become an issue?

I do not work for Reddit. Maybe they have some press contact info on their page you could try? Or Twitter or something?

That was more of a rhetorical question.

Which one of these possibilities is more likely?

a) it was the incredibly rare event affecting most of the popular content on the page, which the host themselves state it was

b) it was something completely unrelated

I know which one I'd put money on!

From elsewhere in the thread:

> According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754780/reddit-api-update...

Deimos, former Reddit admin and creator of tildes.net currently thinks they're related: https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_duri...

EDIT: Reddit themselves confirmed that the outage was related to subs going private.

> “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” said Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/12/reddit-goes-down-just-as-a...

How does one get a user account on Tildes?

It's currently invite-only. I have a few left, but I'm not sure how to send you one privately.

Be invited by a pre-existing user.

We don't know anything about reddit's backend architecture. It might mess up their load handling, or raise other errors.