Semi-related: What happened on June 8th? According to https://www.redditstatus.com/#month, there has been a giant spike in site activity.

There's no spike in request rate (activity) on June 8th. There are spikes in vote and comment processing backlogs, related to a Fastly outage that effected Reddit on that date.

We're techies. It's always an interesting list of questions:

  1) why?
  2) can they blame some CDN or cloud provider?
  3) was it global or local
  4) yea but really.. why? what is the SRE story?

Fortunately social media sites are not very critical services.

You could have reddit, twitter, fb, ig, hn, down hours per day and nothing bad would happen. Maybe even something positive. It's only problem for those companies because they lose some ad revenue.