That's not entirely correct. What actually happened was that the button itself had a buffer which accounted for the possibility of people pressing the button, but the press registering 'late'. The buffer was 2 seconds I believe, and because of that even when the button hit zero, you could still press it for two seconds until it actually ends. So, it did hit zero more then once, but the click-buffer never expired until the time it actually ended - All the times before that, an account clicked the button before the click-buffer expired.

Ah, that makes sense, thank you.

I was under the impression that each reset was in some way due to network issues, either reddit being down briefly or a valid press not resetting the timer. Either way, it's gone long enough. I am both surprised and not surprised there is a necro sub to keep it going.

I think that's what the admins claimed, but there was some disbelief, and external monitoring websites were showing the button as being at 0 for a few seconds each time. If it were an actual problem, I think it would remain at 0 until it got noticed, not just for a few seconds.

Noticed that the post never says anything like "it finally reached zero", it just mentions who the last presser was.

For what it was worth I saw one of the times it went down. The monitor started beeping so I went to the tab and watched it count down to zero. Hitting refresh presented me with the "reddit is down" logo and nothing on reddit worked so I believe them when they say everything simply went down. Just think about it, it was an april 1st gag, it wasn't suppose to have this type of uptime.

Ah, then I stand corrected.

It was a mix of the Cassandra servers serving the button being down and the buffer mentioned previously.