Reddit suffers major outage as GameStop shares soar 100%

Online discussion forum Reddit suffered a major outage and users were unable to load the website that showed a blank white page for nearly an hour.

The website appeared to have gone down after GameStop stock soared 100 per cent in trading late on Wednesday, reports The Verge.

"At the moment, it's unclear if the two are related, but the subreddit seemed to be getting a lot of heavy traffic right before Reddit began crashing," the report mentioned.

One of Reddit's most controversial communities called r/WallStreetBets, has helped GameStop stock soar.

The video game retailer's shares started to soar and closed at $91.71 -- up nearly 104 per cent for the day.

It's the highest the stock has been since it fell back down to Earth at the beginning of the month following the unprecedented Reddit-driven rally.

"We're were experiencing issues on web and mobile clients, but we're back up now!" Reddit said in a tweet.

"We've identified the underlying issue and systems are beginning to recover. We are currently investigating this issue," it added.

Video game retailer GameStop has announced that Jim Bell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, has resigned, after recent wild swings in GameStop's stock triggered by retail traders on Reddit.

Media reports said that while Bell's exit was unrelated to the recent wild swings in GameStop's stock spurred by retail traders on the Reddit social media site, "his departure was initiated by the company".

--IANS

na/