Bluesky confirms ongoing service outages caused by DDoS attack

Bluesky is currently facing service interruptions caused by a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack—a cyberattack that floods servers with junk traffic to knock them offline—which began around 8:40 p.m. ET on April 15. Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang attributed the ongoing outages to this cyberattack, which has caused intermittent disruptions to user feeds, notifications, threads, and search.

The company reports there is no evidence of unauthorized access to private data. However, users continue to face intermittent errors and rate limits while the team works to mitigate the attack. Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app load slowly at times, while at other times they display error messages. For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display an error message indicating that the feed is temporarily unavailable due to high traffic and that the server’s rate limit has been exceeded. Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed have frequently faced this issue, even as users’ personal feeds remain functional. The team also posted an update with a typo indicating that they were investigating an incident with service in one of their regions. At 3:46 a.m. ET, Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.” The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix but said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.

While Bluesky struggles, the broader decentralized ecosystem is seeing movement. The service disruptions are impacting Bluesky’s own application and servers, but other communities operating on the same underlying protocol remain unaffected. Blacksky, a decentralized social network community operating on ATmosphere—the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network—reported a significant spike in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours. Users, developers, and other ATmosphere founders, such as Sebastian at Eurosky, have been promoting alternative services during the outage as users look for alternatives.

Why it matters

The incident highlights the vulnerability of decentralized social networks to traditional cyberattacks, while simultaneously testing the resilience of the broader ecosystem as users seek alternatives.