Reddit down: Site not working as users see 'Ow!' message

Reddit has gone down, leaving users unable to access the site.

Instead, visitors saw a message reading “Ow!” and indicating that the company’s “CDN was unable to reach our servers”.

A CDN, or content delivery network, is the system of servers and data centres that serve up a website’s content to its users.

The same page directed users to Reddit’s official status page, which claimed that all systems were operational.

Tracking website Down Detector did however show a surge in the number of users reporting problems.

Many of those issues were reported in the US and UK, the site showed, though that may simply be a consequence of the location of Reddit’s users.

There appeared to be no easy fix for the problems. The website refused to load whether or not a user was signed in, and when accessing both the homepage and specific Reddit pages.

Accessing the service through its app did however appear to work as usual.