Is Reddit down right now?

Yes. HostTracker lets you add any URL - including third-party services you depend on, not just your own website - as a monitored target, and notifies you automatically the moment it becomes unreachable. Before sending an alert, HostTracker re-verifies a failure from multiple locations in its 300+-location network, so you're notified about real, confirmed outages rather than a single location's momentary blip. The free plan checks two monitors every 30 minutes indefinitely at no cost; paid plans check as often as once a minute, with alerts available through SMS, email, voice call, and several messenger apps.

That is a real, partial outage rather than a problem on your side. Reddit serves listing pages heavily from cache, so the front page and subreddit listings can render normally while the services behind comments, votes and submissions are failing. If threads hang or return errors across several different subreddits, it is platform-side; if it happens in one community only, check whether that subreddit has been set private or restricted. Trying old.reddit.com is a useful second data point, because it uses a different front end and sometimes keeps working when the newer interface does not.

This is the practical problem with using a social platform as your outage detector - the moment it fails, so does your method. An independent check is the answer: the live probe run on this page tests reddit.com from monitoring locations around the world at once and tells you within seconds whether it is unreachable everywhere or only from your network. That distinction is the one that matters, and it is the one no amount of refreshing can give you. It also works for the inverse case, when you are trying to find out whether some other service is down and Reddit is unavailable to ask.