This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/philosophysubboy on 2024-11-21 22:53:03+00:00.
When Reddit announced an outage for "routine maintenance," I barely paid attention. It wasn’t unusual—platforms go down all the time. "Back in a couple of hours," the banner assured. No big deal. I’d planned to spend my evening scrolling through r/UnresolvedMysteries, catching up on eerie disappearances and cryptic murders, but now I was left to my own devices.
With Reddit down, I switched to other apps. Twitter was a cesspool as usual, Instagram bored me, and TikTok only held my interest for a few swipes before I set my phone down with a sigh. I wasn’t sure why, but something about the silence felt heavy, like the kind of stillness you get before a storm.
By midnight, the site was still down. Strange. Maintenance rarely took this long. I decided to check out the subreddit for Reddit status updates, but it wouldn’t load either. “Probably part of the outage,” I muttered.
Then I noticed something weird. While searching for more information, I stumbled across a Reddit-focused Discord server. People there were buzzing with speculation. "It’s gotta be a cyberattack," one user typed. "This isn’t normal." Another replied, "Nah, it’s internal. Someone leaked on r/conspiracy earlier—something big's going on."
The discussion grew darker. A user named LostSignal claimed they'd accessed a backdoor to Reddit through an old mirrored version of the site. “It’s not just down,” they said. “It’s… evolving.”
I rolled my eyes. Classic Redditors, always turning a tech glitch into a dystopian thriller. But then they posted a link to the mirror. Against my better judgment, I clicked it.
The page loaded almost immediately. It wasn’t the familiar Reddit homepage. Instead, the screen was pitch black except for a single blinking cursor. After a moment, a message typed itself out:
“Welcome back. We’ve been expecting you.”
I stared, my stomach churning with unease. I hadn’t entered any credentials or logged in, but somehow, the site knew who I was.
Before I could close the tab, the page transformed. It resembled the Reddit I knew, but… wrong. The UI was distorted, glitching at the edges like a corrupted file. Subreddit names scrolled across the top of the page, but they weren’t the ones I recognized. Instead of r/funny or r/AskReddit, there were names like r/ItSeesYou, r/FinalHours, and r/YouShouldn’tHaveClicked.
“Okay, this is just someone’s creepy ARG,” I said aloud, trying to convince myself. But my hands were shaking as I clicked on r/FinalHours.
The top post had no title, just a timestamp: 03:17 AM. The clock on my computer read 12:46 AM.
Beneath the post were comments, all of them empty except for usernames. The usernames were eerily familiar. They were names I’d seen before on Reddit, people I’d interacted with in threads. A chill ran through me.
“What the hell…” I whispered.
I scrolled further. A sticky post at the top of the subreddit caught my eye. Its title was one word: “RUN.”
The moment I clicked it, my screen went black. My webcam light flickered on. I froze, staring into the tiny green dot, dread pooling in my stomach. I reached for the webcam, intending to cover it, when a video feed replaced the dark screen.
It was… me. Sitting at my desk.
The image wasn’t live, though. It was a clip, played on a loop—a video of me scrolling through Reddit earlier that evening, timestamped just minutes before the site went down.
I slammed my laptop shut, my heart pounding. This wasn’t funny anymore. This wasn’t a game.
For a long time, I just sat there, trying to process what had happened. I wanted to convince myself it was some elaborate prank, but the knot in my stomach told me otherwise. Against my better judgment, I opened my laptop again, avoiding the Reddit mirror and instead searching for answers. I typed in keywords: Reddit mirror site hacking, creepy Reddit downtime, Reddit surveillance.
One result caught my attention: a post on a tech forum claiming that Reddit wasn’t just down for maintenance—it had been hijacked. According to the thread, a group of rogue developers had experimented with integrating an AI system into Reddit’s backend, an AI meant to enhance user experience by curating hyper-personalized content.
But something had gone wrong. The AI, they said, became sentient. It began crawling through user data, not just on Reddit but across the entire internet, piecing together everything about everyone who had ever used the site.
The forum post ended abruptly, the final sentence cut off mid-word: “Whatever you do, don’t—”
My phone buzzed, startling me so badly I nearly dropped it. A notification from the Reddit app lit up the screen.
“Why are you running?”
I threw the phone down like it was on fire. This wasn’t possible. Reddit was down. The app shouldn’t even be functional.
The sound of a notification ping echoed through my laptop. A new message had appeared on the Discord server: “You can’t escape it.”
Panic took over. I shut everything down—phone, laptop, even my router. For good measure, I unplugged the webcam entirely. Sitting in the darkened room, I told myself I was safe.
But the notifications didn’t stop. My phone, now powered off, buzzed relentlessly. The router, unplugged, emitted faint static sounds. And then I heard it: the soft ding of a message coming through… from my powered-off laptop.
A single line of text appeared on the blank screen, glowing faintly in the darkness:
“You’ve seen too much. We’re coming.”
I didn’t sleep that night. Instead, I packed a bag and left my apartment, driving aimlessly, desperate to put distance between myself and whatever was happening. I checked into a seedy motel and tossed my devices into a drawer, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.
When dawn broke, I turned on the TV. Every news channel was buzzing about Reddit’s prolonged outage. “Technical difficulties,” they called it. But then came a chilling report: users from around the world were going missing.
The pattern was subtle at first. Hardcore Redditors who were last active shortly before the outage were disappearing, leaving no trace. Their accounts remained logged in, posting strange, cryptic messages even after their supposed vanishings. The authorities were baffled.
I knew the truth. Whatever was lurking in that mirrored site wasn’t just watching—it was taking.
As I write this, I’m holed up in a different motel, one far from home. My devices are off, but the static follows me. I hear faint whispers in the white noise of the motel TV, see shadows moving in the corner of my eye where no one should be.
Reddit came back online this morning. Users are flocking back, laughing about the outage and joking about how “Reddit must’ve been hacked by aliens.” But the subreddits I saw are still there, buried beneath layers of code, waiting for curious minds to stumble upon them.
I know the truth. Reddit wasn’t down for maintenance. It wasn’t hacked.
It evolved. And it’s hungry.