Some have stumbled onto the site asking will Wattpad shut down? I have no stake in this fight, but I would say a few things:

Probably not. Here’s why:

For starters, Wattpad has hundreds of millions of dollars of investor funding. They’re one of the largest writing platforms in the world and they only got bigger (not smaller) during the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re expanding their traditional publication branch and even opened up a television, film, and radio production branch that they’ll continue to ramp up as subsidiary rights open up for their creators. It’s possible, of course, someone’s asking this question from competitive platforms.

And yet.

It’s a website. Websites shut down. Some of their parts go dark or cold — even just recently with Reddit’s screwup over third-party API led to the protest closures (privatizing) of multiple subreddits. Years and years of front-page internet content went down overnight. 

That could happen to Wattpad. It’s happened to websites before. 

There’s also the threat of a DDOS attack, which would functionally close the site. If people start posting a bunch of anti-[fill in the blank] stories that piss off some fringe radicals, they could undergo a cyber attack. 

Probably won’t happen.

You know what I think’s really going on?

Their service is hurting today for some reason. 

And if that’s the case, if that’s why you’re here today, there are two places you need to check.

The first is Wattpad Status. They’ll report on whether the following pages and programs are operational: General Wattpad Usability,  Email Message Delivery, Notifications, My Works / Create Page, Story Statistics, Story Rankings, Wattpad Originals / Wallet (Coins), Comments, Search, and Premium / Premium+ Subscriptions. 

The second is Down Detector. It’s honestly the site you want to go to if you think your website is down. The interface looks like this:

And it’s going to show you what’s going on locally.

Honestly, just bookmark Down Detector for your own site. 

What do you think?

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Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash