most likely, yes. There was no notice of a planned outage, and the timing of them both going down within 15 minutes of each other. Lemmy server programming code isn’t very robust when it comes to performance, it is possible to busy up the database to a point that the site become unresponsive. I don’t know what is going on with lemmy.ml being entirely unreachable, the devs who run that server don’t normally work on weekends… and normally nginx responds with an error at minimum. Nothing at all is loading
I guess the people who run Reddit really think none of their audience was educated by say… Snoopy… or seen a “no skateboarding” sign in their life. You can just hang out anywhere IRL!