this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere...
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It's never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
As an engineer, this sounds most plausible - they had proactive detection and resolution in place against various attacks and system failures, which got triggered due to the massive drop in public subreddits/users/activity, and made everything worse. Honestly, this isn't a scenario their engineers could have easily predicted...
I'm not sure if it's just a load balancing issue. if all of Reddit can only access specific subs, maybe they split their servers that way
but I'm just guessing, because it doesn't make much sense to go down, when there is less data to process...
in a way it does, when you're building massive scale systems. Say you are the mitigation team and want to protect yourself against a malicious hacker/employee that starts shutting down web servers or removes posting permissions from the DB for everyone. You're going to monitor the frequency of posts and if it drop too fast, you know something's bad happening. You're going to take automated measures against it - maybe freeze access to the DB completely, maybe switch to a (much less tested) backup region/system, etc.. so you can see how things can snowball from there to strange scenarios...
yeah, well, maybe...
usually unexpected situations have unexpected errors. so yeah, you could be right