Reddit experienced an hour-long downtime before it was restored. This major outage was triggered by heavy GameStop trading.
GameStop shares have soared almost 100% and a group on Reddit became very active. The huge traffic to Reddit community page r/WallStreetBets caused the ‘face of the internet’ to crash.
Users have reported experiencing an hour-long outage as they were trying to access the website and the link to the social network was down.
The social network announced the outage on Twitter.
Resolved: We're sounding the all clear! This incident is resolved. https://t.co/7y8D9F3AgI
— reddit status (@redditstatus) February 24, 2021
The crash seems to have followed unprecedented traffic to a subreddit community page WallStreetBets.
The Robinhood stopped allowing its clients to buy shares of GameStop and other companies that had also been promoted by users on Reddit. When the restrictions were partially removed, the value of the share soared up.
The community played a key role in enticing big investors in buying the GameStop stock earlier this year. The surge in GameStop (GME) stocks seems to be the result of the so-called short squeeze in the stock market.
The stocks of GameStop soared up when brokers once again allowed their clients to buy shares.
In 2007, a GameStop share was worth $62.11. In March 2020 the share price hit a record low. In January this year, the share price of the video game retailer peaked to $300. Currently, the share price stands at $168.
