Funny Story About Reddit's Failing Systems Hitting the Corporate World - Almost
I am a PSE for a large corporation that most people would not be familiar with (those users that frequent this sub probably would). However, we supply business critical software to many of the big companies you definitely do know. This puts me in a position where I work directly with some of the most well paid 'tech execs' you can find and has lead to many hilarious situations. Those are stories for another day however. Today is about Reddit - for they have angered me greatly.
I get a ticket this morning around 10 AM. As usual, I get a bunch of helpful information including an irrelevant screenshot and a one liner about how the RSS feed that they have pulling into one of their widgets wasn't working. On closer inspection, these mf's were hitting the r/sysadmin(!) RSS feed and pulling in new posts. Now, this is strictly business software we are dealing with. So while I can absolutely see why certain groups would value that feed, it was definitely the first I had ever seen such a thing in any of our environments.
Naturally (I feel), I am immediately floored with the potential possibilities and started thinking about how I might have to explain to this guy all that has transpired the last ~week in a business-professional email... I took a minute just to soak that in and let out a small chuckle. Fuck u/spez, I mutter.
Well since I was given zero actual information about their issue, other than 'no workie', I slid over to my main PC to go check r/sysadmin as I have done many times in the past - like muscle memory. I snap out of that, of course. I am done with Reddit. I had an idea. Just for fun I hit up Lemmy, just to see what was there. And lo and behold we have a fucking post about the massive reddit outage that went down today. I am all smiles at what has already happened here and hit downdector just to confirm. Yup, almost 50k reports at peak. LMFAO. I mean, really? My god Reddit. What are you doing?
So, given the info I was provided, I let him know that there was an outage and that was likely all the issue was - Try again once it has resided. A few small chuckles and I thought the story was done.
Now here's where I really lost it. I get word back a bit later and it's once again a one liner - 'No. Our sad, sad admins have been without r/sysadmin for almost two weeks now :(' I was laughing for a good 5 minutes at just the absurdity of it all (this issue obviously doesn't have anything to do with the recent changes, lol), all against the background of what we are seeing with Reddit. It also helped me realize how far reaching these failures are actually going to be once the end of the month rolls around. Colossal fuck up.
Dear god, this reminds me of the good ol days when stuff like goatse'ing tens of millions of people happened because of Myspace shenanigans. While far from this situation, what lead to it feels similar as we chronicle Reddit going down in flames and all the disruption we're about to see as it lets out a giant drawn out death rattle.
Amen! It absolutely has those vibes. That is what brings me hope with a federated platform. There have already been many skilled and talented people (like our own @[email protected] ) that have risen to the occasion and have already spent countless hours helping to get this off the ground. Hearing lots of positives.
@00Lemming Let's not forget that according to the mods of /r/sysadmin, sysadmins rely on it to do their job. An entirely cromulent reason to support reddit's side of this enshittification.
Oh yeah, for sure. It was just the fact that the reasoning for going through the effort of building something out in a product that isn't designed for system administration seemed dubious at best. Likely were not allowed to access reddit while at work and so created this as a workaround. As any good SysAdmin would do ;)