Reddit down: Website hit by major outage just hours after site went completely offline

Reddit has stopped working completely.

Visitors to the site see a message reading "our CDN was unable to reach our servers," accompanied by a picture of a sad alien.

The outage comes just hours after a huge issue that took the site down completely and forced Reddit to promise to fix the problem publicly.

Since then, Reddit's website appears to have mostly fixed itself but continues to be hit by problems.

The error message's mention of CDN refers to a content delivery network. That is the technology that allows web pages to be sent between a company's servers and the user – a central part of the process, which means that any problems can immediately be widespread and take pages down entirely.

Reddit's status page posted overnight UK time that there was a problem with the site and that it was investigating. Around four hours later, it said the issue had been located and that a fix was being rolled out, and soon after that it said the issues were fixed.

But according to the website Down Detector, some small problems lasted for many hours after that. It's not clear if those issues are related to the problems that hit users overnight.