A 17-year-old Mt. Juliet teen's post on the social media website Reddit has landed tech giant Apple Inc. in hot water this week, with news breaking Friday that some were filing class action lawsuits against the company for throttling performance on older iPhones.

The issue came to light after Tyler Barney, a high school student and tech aficionado in the Nashville area, also known by the username TeckFire, posted on the popular message board website that he believed he'd discovered why Apple phones slow down with age.

The post went viral with several websites sharing the reported discovery.

The post and its reaction led to an official response from Apple, published on the website TechCrunch:

"Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components," the statement said."

"Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future."

Now, CNBC and other publications are reporting that the company is being sued.

After troubleshooting the issue and using a number of apps to measure the performance of his personal iPhone 6s, Barney discovered his phone's capabilites slowed down after downloading Apple's operating system iOS 10.2.1.

"It became buggy. That's the best way to put it," Barney was quoted in a news release his uncle Rob Blevins sent out to news outlets Friday. "It was a big mess all the time. Even typing was painful. Seconds passed between keystrokes."

Barney assumed the next updated operating system release by Apple would bring his phone back to life. In the meantime, he tried his brother's older model iPhone 6. Still, he said his brother's phone, which had an inferior processor but was a year newer, was much faster.

Barney turned to the Internet, where some suggested he replace the battery. He did this and his phone sped back up, so he concluded the decreased performance was due to the phones lithium-ion batteries.

Barney then took to Reddit, via his username TeckFire, to share his findings and that's when the post went viral.

And this is how a 17-year-old disrupted the internet this week.

The USA TODAY NETWORK-Tennessee confirmed Barney's identity as TeckFire, via a login check and a message sent to the account.

Reporter Andy Humbles contributed to this report.

Reporter Jordan Buie can be reached at 615-726-5970 or a jbuie@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter @jordanbuie.