Several hundred sections of Reddit, the famous entertainment, social networking, and news website, were not available on Friday, which appeared as a protest by the site's moderators after the high-ranking employee of the company was fired.

It has been said that the protest affected nearly 300 individual discussion areas called as subreddits. These areas focus on individual topics like technology, art and business.

Subreddits are basically moderated by self-appointed members of the community, and not by official Reddit employees. The closure of the sections started Thursday evening and expanded rapidly on Friday.

Majorly, the whole process started after Victoria Taylor, Reddit's director of talent, was dismissed on Thursday afternoon.

Later on Friday, the volunteers through a document posted online asked for better communication with official staff, and as well as improved software tools for community management.

Reddit's interim chief executive, Ellen Pao, in a telephone interviews on Friday, said, "I'm sorry we let our community down yesterday. We should have informed our community moderators about the transition and worked through it with them".

So far, the company has not provided any explanation for Taylor's dismissal. It rather said that it cannot reveal any details about the issue as it would be against company's policy of not commenting on personal matters.

Pao affirmed that the company had appointed Kristine Fasnacht as liaison with Reddit administrators and the scores of volunteer moderators who oversee subreddits.

As per reports, Reddit is one of the highest trafficked sites on the Internet. It has more than 160 million regular monthly visitors.

By Friday afternoon, a number of subreddits including the popular IAmA section slowly started coming back online, sources familiar with the issue told.