They could also be having to check lots of people against the lists of who is allowed in what private subs. Which could in turn cause problems if the code there assumes that usually people are allowed in the private subs they visit and relies on that to be fast.

Not sure that there were any private subs with tens of millions of disallowed subscribers before this morning.

More likely bots than people if they're hitting it that hard

"It was u/christianselig's fault for not paying us $20 million uwu"

Hackernews is back up and has a thread with more context (speculation?) On the reddit outage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294244. Cloudflare having issues is pretty interesting though.

I have to admit, among the set of [reddit, Lemmy], I did not predict that the one expecting the more serious availability issues today would be reddit.