Reddit's popular 'ask me anything' feature is down after a key employee is gone

Reddit's popular Ask Me Anything (iAMA) feature is offline following a key employee's departure.

The iAMA and Science subreddits both were set to private today after Reddit's director of Communications, Victoria Taylor was allegedly dismissed. In a Reddit thread about her departure, she replied that she was "dazed" and "hopefully" plans to stay in the PR field.

Reddit and Taylor have not yet responded to request for comment.

One of Taylor's job duties was coordinating the site's popular AMAs.  Two of the site's most popular posts ever are AMAs: the one with Barack Obama and a conversation with a man with two penises. The AMA subreddit became such a popular section of the site that Reddit eventually spun it out into its own app.

Reddit user Karmanaut broke the news of Taylor's departure in a post and explained that the AMA subreddit had been set to private as the moderators try to figure out how to deal with the logistics of the sessions.

"We have been really blindsided by all of this. As a result, we will need to go through our processes and see what can be done without her," said Karmanaut in the post.

The message on the AMA subreddit currently reads: "Due to internal administration reorganization at reddit, /r/IAmA has temporarily been made private by the moderators. We will be using this time to restructure our process for AMAs."

The science subreddit has also followed suit and gone dark. Its private message also hints at the reorganization: "Due to an unexpected Reddit administrative personnel change /r/science is temporarily private so that we can resolve the situation, our apologizes for any disruption this may cause."

Reddit users are not handling the change well.