Reddit rival crashes as users jump ship to protest staff sacking

Online community Voat is back online after a massive number of Reddit user switched to the site following uproar over a key staff member’s dismissal.

The site, which hosts a number of discussion forums from politics to cats, crashed over the weekend.

Voat surged from a ranking below 80,000 on Alexa to one of top 15,000 sites online and one of the top 2000 sites in the Unites States within six weeks. The return should indicate that the site can now handle the elevated traffic levels.

Reddit has seen a number of its forums closed after the swift sacking of beloved moderator Victoria Taylor. Taylor was let go after the recent Jessie Jackson AMA debacle on Reddit last Wednesday.

His commentary in response to tough AMA questions was not well-received, and she was the fall girl for the situation. This has led to many subreddits shutting down in protest of Taylor’s firing and Voat has been getting plenty of new visitors.

Voat came to be early in 2015 and has seen fast results for its ethos of providing a free speech online platform alternative to Reddit.

Voat has seen massive traffic spikes over the last two months that have overwhelmed the site, which clearly was not equipped to handle Reddit-level traffic.