[archon]

Pure speculation: With so many subs now private, they're hitting a performance wall searching for enough content to fill the front page. If I'm logged in and go to the site root, it throws an error. If logged out, it works. If I go to a specific (not privatized) sub, it works.

[aeyes]

Rule number one for high traffic sites with a lot of pageloads coming from search engines: Aggressively cache content shown to unauthenticated users. Since they don't really interact with the site, they probably won't even notice if it's a bit stale.

They used to have a really good blog post about their caching infra which for some reason was deleted. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210205121832/https://redditblo...

[jeanlucas]

One thing that could be happening is many clients/bots/crawlers pinging pages that gone private now and that is overwhelming servers.

[DaSHacka]

Wouldn't that be easier on the server load? You're ust displaying the error page instead of actually grabbing the feed of the subreddit

[coopierez]

I'm experiencing the same. /r/games is not private and it works.

[skulk]

Another anecdote: top posts of all time load for me, even top posts this week. But front page and r/popular don't.

[agloe_dreams]

I would expect most of the 'top' categories are cached with a long-ish TTL. If Reddit's DB is down that would explain why those types of sorts are functioning.

[turtleyacht]

Yeah :) Front page was a for loop and too many subreddits went dark