They have been granted a lot more help from Conde Nast. They're in the process of hiring four more developers.

http://blog.reddit.com/2011/03/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-po...

devops and all, the ratio's still staggering for the number of hits that reddit gets.

Just one programmer, spladug, on the job for 4 months.

Idle speculation is a bit useless, but it really makes you wonder why so many of their team have left recently, doesn't it? I wonder if the stress of keeping up with the increased load (and subsequent downtime) became too much for some of them.