Reddit blames black holes for downtime

Davey Winder
Friday, 22 August 2008 16:28

Business IT - Networking

Even in these always-on times when business continuity translates into keeping your website up, it is not that unusual for the occasional downtime to occur. Most sites do not blame black holes for downtime though...

I got up this morning and headed over to Reddit for my daily fix of the interesting, shocking and downright bizarre. What was the world talking about, I wondered?

Unfortunately, I could not find out because Reddit was experiencing one of those 'currently offline' moments that happens every now and then. No big deal, it promised to be back soon.

Most sites will post a small notice saying something about 'planned system maintenance' at best, or just let the browser return its default 'not responding' nonsense at customer not-caring worse.

Reddit appears not to be most sites.

I found myself confronted by the Reddit alien cartoon character logo with a sad face and holding a crowbar, surrounded by crabs. The banner exclaiming 'wtf?!'

WTF indeed. Reddit went on to explain that it would be back shortly and the alien was headcrab hunting.

OK, so far so stupid. Surely the explanations would make more sense when I reached the big red block of text below? Er, no, not really.

Unless you count the following as being sensible:

"reddit is currently offline. it turns out the LHC was more dangerous than everyone thought. But don't worry, we'll have reddit back up soon so you can discuss the implications of micro-black-holes."

WTF?!

The LHC referred to is actually the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research. An experiment to probe into the secrets of black holes by injecting particles into the biggest atom smasher the world has ever seen.

Dan Brown fans might want to re-read their copy of Angels and Demons at this point. I, on the other hand, have to go as Reddit has come back up and I need my fix...