Reddit Request Rate Limited Outage Explained

If Reddit stops responding and delivers a “request rate limited” message out of the blue when you click to load more posts or comments, you’re running up against a protective wall in place there—not doing anything inherently ban-worthy.

The alert, in particular, tends to spike when the broader internet is unstable or Reddit’s own systems are experiencing heavy load.

That is when reports by regular people will spike on crowdsourced monitoring services, and the phrase surge turns up in searches on Google Trends. When this happens, Reddit’s status page usually says there are “elevated errors.” This suggests strain across some of its infrastructure and not a single feature that breaks.

What “Request Rate Limited” Really Means

At a technical level, this is Reddit implementing rate limiting, the industry-standard way platforms ensure reliability. Under the hood it is mapped to an HTTP 429 Too Many Requests, telling apps and browsers that they are issuing too many requests and should back off.

Rate limiting provides protection for important services—databases, search, media delivery—when traffic spikes or surges occur. Systems can also deliver a “Retry-After” delay to indicate clients should not make another try until that moment arrives. Even when browsing under normal circumstances, shared infrastructure can produce session limits.

Why Reddit Restricts Access During Outages

Two things intersect during an outage: people refresh more, and so do computers. When pages fail, apps keep trying, resulting in what the company calls a “retry storm.” If a cloud provider or network edge is impaired, cache misses soar and backend calls increase, compounding the load.

In the case of a cascading failure, SREs implement an automated circuit breaker, queuing and adjusted per-user and/or per-endpoint thresholds. Cloud incidents logged by those providers—such as Amazon Web Services—and traffic analysis from Cloudflare Radar reveal how even short network blips can reverberate into major platforms, making rate limits a necessary braking system.

How It Appears on the Web and in Reddit’s Apps

In the Reddit app: Sometimes you will see feeds freeze, comments cannot be submitted, and media won’t load prior to receiving the rate limit message. Pages can also half-render, and then error out when trying to fetch comments or votes on both mobile web and desktop.

Third-party clients and tools that use the API may get their own quotas or backoff rules applied to them. These limitations are applied server-side, so you can’t necessarily overcome this block by switching from the app to a browser.

What to Do Right Now When Reddit Shows Rate Limits

• Stop the refresh and give it a few minutes. Rapid taps or constant pulls to refresh can keep you above the cap; waiting allows the server window to reset.
• Try a different connection, e.g., changing from Wi‑Fi to mobile, or vice versa. Some of the limits are IP‑based, so a network change can help if your IP is noisy due to shared traffic.
• Close and restart the app, or open in an incognito browser window to get around aggressive extensions that produce extra requests. You can also try clearing the app’s cache, which may lower the amount of background calls that are part of throttling.
• Refer to reliable sources for expanded explanation. Reddit’s status page, AWS Service Health Dashboard, and trend monitors like Downdetector or Cloudflare Radar can indicate if the issue is site‑wide versus local.

How Engineers Restore Stability During Rate Limits

Under the hood, teams are following the standard playbook. They warm caches, drain overloaded queues, and try to increase capacity where they can.

These measures can be used to drop less important traffic temporarily, favor reads more than writes, or isolate troublesome microservices.

As conditions improve, rate limits are gradually relaxed to prevent a resurgence. These playbooks echo the best practices enumerated in Google’s Site Reliability Engineering guidance, and in post-incident reports from top CDNs and cloud providers.

Is the Problem on Your Side or Reddit’s Servers?

Eliminate local causes by trying another device and network, and try a fresh browser profile. If other sites are running properly and there’s an upsurge in community reports, the throttle is probably server-side and transient.

If you encounter limits while others do not, consider whether background sync tools or ad blockers are retrieving scripts hidden in pages. Cutting down on those extra calls can help keep you below Reddit’s thresholds.

The Bottom Line on Reddit’s Request Rate Limits

“Request rate limited” is not a ban; it’s a relief valve. When traffic is high and capacity comes up short, Reddit slows requests to prevent the service from tipping over. A little break, a few fewer refreshes, and a guilty moment on status sources are generally all it takes to get back to the scrolling.