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On 2015, July 2nd, many redditors woke up to a nightmarish scenario. Many of the online communities they frequented were inaccessible. Instead of the usual layout of reddit, what they beheld was a closed door, that had a notice saying Authorized Personnel Only. This disastrous scenario, which came to be known as AMAgeddon, was one of the most infamous catastrophes that befell the Internet. What happened?
Founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, two roommates of the University of Virginia in 2005, June 23rd, Reddit is one of the largest online social networking service. [1] [2] Reddit is an aggregate of a multitude of independent sub-forums named "subreddits".  [3] One of the most famous subreddits is "IAmA".

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The IAmA subreddit, or "r-slash-I-Am-A", is a subreddit where various special persons answers questions posed by redditors. Its name is a portmanteau of the phrase "I am a...", and the acronym "Ask Me Anything". The persons include, but are not limited to, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, R. L. Stein, the author of the Goosebumps books, a 92 year old Holocaust survivor, and one time, the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama...the list goes on.

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In retrospect, July 2015 seemed like a distant epoch. E3 happened not so long ago, and people were hyped as shit about Fallout 4 and Doom while they played Splatoon and Rocket League. Christopher Lee passed away last month, Satoru Iwata passed away this month. People treated Donald Trump's preisdential bid as a joke, and thought him being president as impossible. Season 5 of Game of Thrones was fucking despised. Cecil the Lion died, Harambe's still alive."See You Again" was dominating the charts. MLG was still a thing. The hottest meme on the internet were "Here In My Garage", and the "Don't Judge Challenge".

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At some time around July 2nd 17:00 GMT, r/IAmA became private. Which means, only users approved by the mods can access the subreddit. Reddit user chickenmagic submitted the question on the OutoftheLoop subreddit, a subreddit dedicated to provide answers and explanations to those "out of the loop" of a certain topic.

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[3] A subreddit can be further classified by its accessibility. The most open type is a public subreddit: everyone can view, create, or comment on content. Further down the accesibility rank is a restricted subreddit: everyone can view and comment, but only approved users can submit content. The furthest down the accessibility rank is a private subreddit: only approved users can view, submit, and comment.

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Around a half an hour later, the head user of r/IAmA, karmanaut, responded to the question. To paraphrase: Victoria Taylor, the Reddit employee responsible for communicating with the person doing the AMA, and organizing time schedules of the AMA was dismissed from her position without prior notification. "We only learned about this whole shitshow because someone modmailed us saying that Victoria was supposed to help them with an AMA and couldn't today." "for /r/IAmA to work the way it currently does, we need Victoria. Without her, we need to figure out a different way for it to work."

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Of course, no subreddit is an island entire of itself, without Victoria, all AMAs in other subreddits such as r/science, r/music, and r/books will be unable to proceed. Therefore the situation escalated further, and more subreddits became private, and closed their doors.

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The worst was yet to come. Many other subreddit moderators who had felt the strong disconnect between the admins and moderators were galled by the sudden, unnotified departure of Victoria. So many moderators began a labor strike, Reddit style. They decided to make their subreddits private in protest of the inability of the admins to communicate with the moderators. The first reddit to go private in protest was AskReddit. The strike then spread like wild fire, TodayILearned, pics, dataisbeautiful, gaming, history, videos, funny, art...to a total of around one hundred subreddits.

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[1] The staff hierarchy of reddit is divided into two classes: Admins are the paid employees of Reddit. They handle the technicalities of Reddit, enforce rules, and are capable of almost everything. Then there are the moderators, a.k.a. mods. They are not paid because Reddit rules specify that moderators cannot attempt to make money from their actions. They have access to various mod tools, such as modmail, change title and text of posts, and various things of their subreddit: For those interested, a full list of their capabilities is in moderations page of the reddit wiki.

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[2] Prior to AMAgeddon, the fact that there is a subtle conflict between admins and moderators is no secret. There was an obvious disconnect between the admins and moderators of the site. Most prominent is the admins' neglect of the moderators' tools. In fact, just the day before AMAgeddon, the admins implemented an update to the search UI. It was disliked by moderators almost unanimously: The admins ignored much of the user feedback, the design between the search page and frontpage is more inconsistent, and worst of all, clicking on a title of a post now takes you to its comments section.

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An intriguing detail of the turn of events was a post made by reddit user K_Lobsta on the self subreddit. Initially vexed by the new Reddit search, K_Lobsta described the whole situation with a compelling baseball diamond metaphor. A man who loves baseball volunteers to create a baseball diamond in his backyard, only to be hindered by ADMINistrative "City guys" who trash the place with beer cans. "Stop throwing beer cans on our lawns while we try to mow them. Use /r/beta as a Beta; listen to the feedback. Fix the things that need fixing, give us the tools we need to do even the simplest of tasks, like reading messages from subscribers. Stop relying on volunteers and third-parties to build the most important and useful tools for moderating this site. Help us help you." This post is perhaps the most succinct summary of the animosity between the admins and the mods, and was almost prophetic in predicting the future events of AMAgeddon.

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I think you're romanticizing it a bit too much, it was mostly just an excuse to complain about Ellen Pao. Victoria and mod tools were talked about way less and mostly just brought as reasons to dislike Ellen Pao. This also happened a less than a month after fatpeoplehate, and a few other subs were banned.

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Dont worry I'm going to bring up Ellen Pao, fatpeoplehate, and scapegoating later. The reason why I delved so deeped into the admin-mod feud was because this feud was what started it all, even though you may not have noticed it. Also, are you really sure that Victoria was "talked about way less" than Ellen Pao in the drama?
The majority of reddit users made a hidden connection of this turn of events with a very controversial decision made by the reddit admins a month ago, named "the Fattening".

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r/FatPeopleHate a.k.a. FPH does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a subreddit dedicated to deouncing the medical condition of obesity and the tolerance around it. FPH amassed around 150k subscribers around June 2015. In June 10th, 2015, Reddit decided to ban FPH outright because FPH have broken "reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals". Undoubtedly, a copious amount of drama ensued, that was named "The Fattening" by reddit user "Dear-underslash-Occupant". Reddit users complained about the leniency other harassing subreddits received, most notably, Coontown and ShitRedditSays. They lamented for the for the past, when the ex-CEO of Reddit, Yishan would stand for free speech. Homeless refugees of FPH resumed denouncing obesity in the pics subreddit. And most importantly, almost all of the hate was targeted toward one specific individual - Ellen Pao, the CEO of reddit at that time. Pictures of Ellen Pao flooded the punchablefaces subreddit, and flourished in upvotes so much that the mods kept the sub on lockdown, and threatened to ban any forms of Pao-posting.

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Furthermore, all attempts of recreating new fat hatred subreddits were immediately foiled by the admins, who banned them without second thought. r/whalewatching, an innocent subreddit dedicated to the act of watching whales was caught in the crossfire, and banned because admins mistook it for a fat hatred subreddit.