Ask HN: How does someone the size of Reddit, go down?

2 pointsnewsoftheday5 comments

Imagine you're Reddit, you do down, like it is right now, thousands of reports in the last few minutes. How can you be that size of Internet company and not have the ability to stay up, resilient to most outage scenarios?

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One minute of their downtime loses about $5k - $10k of ad revenue.

One year of massive redundancy costs (tens of) millions of dollars, and will always be slightly susceptible to failure anyway.

Those sound like pretty good estimates.

Maybe the real question is how does someone that size keep it up so reliably?

You also have to consider which mission is it critical to?

According to the latest data I found online [0], they are earning ~25k/minute, at the moment. With 1 hour of revenue they can pay 3 people to fix the technical debt that caused this and prevent more failures in the future.

[0] - https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RDDT/reddit/revenu...

> Reddit revenue for the twelve months ending September 30, 2025 was $1.905B

$5,219,178 per day

$214,765 per hour

$3,580 per minute

... and productivity skyrocketed. :)

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