Multiple Reddit SubReddits banned for apparent spam [UPDATE]

A wave of SubReddit bans occurred this afternoon seemingly at once, including but not limited to r/Android, r/cricket, r/MiamiDolphins, r/golf, r/auckland, r/tennisstreams, r/Wellington, r/Minneapolis, and possibly others. This ban wave likely occurred due to an automatic switch to combat malicious spam attacks. It is unlikely that these bans were due to human analysis and admin judgement. UPDATE: Most or all SubReddits banned this afternoon are now back in business – and we’re still seeking answers.

“We have no idea what just happened,” said Reddit r/Android moderator u/IAmANOObie, “but we’ll update this post when we find out. Please don’t spam the modqueue with posts about this or you’ll get us banned for real lol.” This is similar to comments posted by moderators in each of the other SubReddits listed above – these posts appeared almost immediately upon the re-administration of each of the SubReddits affected by this incident.

UPDATE: According to Reddit Admin Sodypop, this was indeed just a bit of a mistake. “Yikes, so this is how robots take over the world….” said Sodypop. “It looks like something went terribly, terribly wrong, but we’ve reinstated all the affected subreddits. Our apologies for the scare, and all the troubles this caused!”

In all, the entire down-to-back-up episode happened over the course of around 25 minutes. Sodypop also added, “Oooof, so sorry for the scare! This was obviously a mistake on our end.” According to Reddit’s official status page, no major systems took any sort of dive at the time at which multiple SubReddits were banned. This may rule out any sort of malicious attack – at least the sort that normally appears as a DOS – but we shall see!

Have a peek at the timeline below for other recent Reddit news. This sort of thing doesn’t happen often – but when it does, those that check the site multiple times a day have a sort of Community’s Abed freak-out moment – it’s not easy to deal with downtime!