Reddit recovers from hour-long outage amid heavy trading in GameStop

GameStop, which had closed up about 104% on Wednesday and was once again a favorite pick on the WallStreetBets page, doubled in extended trading, even as the social media platform was not fully functional.

FILE PHOTO: Reddit logos are seen displayed in this illustration taken February 2, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration (REUTERS)

Reddit recovered from an hour-long outage that affected thousands of users on Wednesday afternoon as volatility returned to stocks including GameStop and AMC that were at the center of a slugfest between retail traders and Wall Street.

Videogame retailer GameStop, which had closed up about 104% on Wednesday and was once again a favorite pick on the WallStreetBets page, doubled in extended trading, even as the social media platform was not fully functional.

Analysts that follow the stock offered several reasons for the surge, including a corporate reshuffle. The firm had on Tuesday said its finance head Jim Bell will step down next month.

Reddit, now more famous for its day-trading forum where individual traders recently triggered a rally in many shorted stocks, has faced several outages in recent months.

At the peak of the latest outage, there were more than 52,000 reports of people facing issues with the platform, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.

To be sure, Downdetector only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage might have affected a larger number of users.

SwaggyStocks, which aggregates sentiment on shares discussed on WallStreetBets which has about 9 million participants, showed GameStop and AMC were the most discussed stocks on the page.

Shares of the cinema theater operator AMC, which closed up 18%, were up another 15% after the bell.