Screenshot by CNET

The narwhals are not baconing at all: Reddit is down.

The popular social forum went down Thursday for "emergency maintenance." In a status update just before 5 p.m. PT, Reddit said it was bringing the site back slowly.

The so-called front page of the internet went down at 3:26 p.m. PT, said Reddit, and was replaced with the maintenance message and a rotation of quips suggesting you go outside or go check out today's xkcd.

Reddit said on its status site that it had a "slight issue" with a routine software upgrade. A spokeswoman for the site pointed to the Reddit Status page for any updates.

As expected, fans of Reddit took to Twitter during the outage to generally freak out.