Thousands of Reddit Inc. forums today switched into private mode in protest over the company’s controversial changes to its application programming interface, API.

At least 7,000 pages engaged in voluntary blackouts, which restrict the public from seeing those pages. This included the r/todayilearned, r/funny, and r/gaming subreddits which, between them, have about 30 million subscribers. The blackout included smaller forums, which together also have millions of subscribers.

The blackout led to site instability and a crash. Much of the website wouldn’t load today, with the company saying there’d been a major outage. “We’re aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible,” Reddit said on its status page. The problem has now been resolved.

The protests are a result of the website’s new application programming interface policy. In the past, Reddit allowed third parties to use the vast trove of data on the site for their products and services without any payment. Now Reddit is asking for a “premium access” toll, which means those third-party apps could end up paying about $5 for every one of their users. According to some of those companies, this could mean paying millions of dollars to Reddit.

Last month, Reddit announced the change, explaining that its 57 million users have created an almost priceless resource for companies who use the data to train advanced generative artificial intelligence chatbots. There’s no doubt some of the biggest AI companies, such as Microsoft Corp. or OpenAI LP, could afford the asking price, but smaller companies say they have been priced out. At the time of the announcement, Reddit did say that terms might differ for “reasonable and appropriate use cases,” although some companies in protest haven’t met the criteria for a reasonable case.

Last week one of the victims of the pricing changes, Christian Selig, the developer of the very popular Apollo app, said he’d now have to pay about $20 million to Reddit. “It goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card,” he said in a statement.

Reddit will have its work cut out dealing with this the protests, but it appears unwilling to make any changes to the policy at the moment. The large group of subreddits who forced the site to glitch today said some of the forums will remain in the dark “unless the issue is adequately addressed.” A spokesperson for the group added, “This isn’t something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love.”

Photo: Brett Jordan/Flickr