Users across several countries reportedly found themselves staring at empty feeds and endlessly loading pages on Thursday after Reddit experienced a temporary disruption that affected both its website and mobile app. Outage-tracking platform Downdetector recorded a sudden jump in complaints during the disruption window, with users reporting issues such as subreddits not opening, comments refusing to load and feeds failing to refresh. Reports surfaced from multiple regions at nearly the same time, pointing to a broader service instability rather than a local internet problem.In India, users from cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad reported trouble accessing the platform. Similar complaints also appeared from parts of the United States, including California, Texas, New York and Illinois.Reddit blank feeds, slow pages and frozen comments frustrate usersAs complaints climbed on outage-monitoring platforms, many users shifted to other social media apps to check whether the issue was widespread. Several described seeing blank homepages, unusually slow loading times and repeated error messages while trying to open posts or comment threads.Some users said Reddit appeared to work intermittently, with certain sections loading while others remained inaccessible. This suggested that the disruption may have affected parts of Reddit’s infrastructure unevenly instead of causing a total shutdown.Downdetector also flagged elevated incident activity tied to Reddit’s web services, mobile apps and API systems during the same period.At the time of reporting, Reddit’s official status page had not confirmed a full-scale outage.Reddit has seen similar trouble recentlyThis is not the first time the platform has run into technical issues in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Reddit users worldwide faced similar disruptions involving comment-loading failures and broken feeds after the company acknowledged “elevated error rates” affecting sections of its infrastructure.During that episode too, outage-monitoring platforms recorded thousands of simultaneous complaints from users spread across different regions.Downdetector and similar services rely mainly on user-submitted reports combined with system signal irregularities. While these reports do not independently confirm a platform-wide technical failure, sudden spikes are often treated as early indicators of service instability.By late Thursday, some users reported that Reddit had started functioning normally again, though others continued to face occasional loading delays.Reddit had not released any technical explanation for the disruption at the time of writing.Reddit’s new fight is against AI-generated ‘slop’The disruption comes at a time when Reddit is also preparing new measures aimed at protecting what it calls authentic human interaction on the platform.In a recent blog post, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman spoke about the growing flood of AI-generated content online and how it is changing internet conversations.“The internet feels different lately. It’s getting harder to tell who or what you’re interacting with,” Huffman wrote.He added that Reddit’s purpose is “for people to talk to people.”As part of the upcoming changes, Reddit may ask certain suspicious accounts to verify that they are human. However, Huffman clarified that such checks would remain limited and “will not apply to most users.”