Reddit down: Site not working and won't load as users told to 'keep refreshing'

'Sorry, we have failed you,' an error message read

A sign hangs on the door of an office at Reddit headquarters in San Francisco, California April 15, 2014 (REUTERS/Robert Galbraith)

Reddit went down twice on Wednesday, with the website failing to load for visitors.

"Sorry, we have failed you," an error message during the second outage read. "Try refreshing!"

The problem followed a very short, but significant, outage earlier in the day.

The self-proclaimed “front-page of the internet” suffered its first global outage on Wednesday, with more than 4,000 reports to the website Down Detector.

According to website ranking site Alexa, Reddit is the fifth most-visited website in the US and the 18th most popular site in the world.

The website appeared to return to full functionality within 15 minutes of going down.