Reddit down under “heavy load”, two hours and counting. [Updated]

Hugely popular link sharing and discussion site Reddit has been down for over two hours, leading to outbursts of frustration on Twitter from its users, or “Redditors”.

The Conde Nast-owned site, known for its strong sense of community, hit the one billion page views per month mark in January, meaning that downtime of this length is pretty significant – especially for those addicts used to reading it all day.

Many users are seeing Reddit’s version of Twitter’s failwhale (below), which indicates that the site is currenty under “heavy load”, although we’re hearing that some appear to be able to access certain pages sporadically. We’ve contacted Reddit for further information and will update this post when we receive it.

UPDATE: Reddit notes on its Facebook page: “Eating the leftover Huevos Rancheros was a *bad* idea. Working on getting the site back up to full speed ASAP. sorry for the increase in productivity, but thanks for being patient.” The site appears to be recovering.

UPDATE 2: Reddit explains to us: “We lost two Amazon instances at the same time for unknown reasons, and then our automated redundant system failed to start due to the nature of the instance failure”