Brandon Fletcher
Bluesky is currently experiencing significant disruptions, causing a major impact on its users. The platform has acknowledged that several of its systems are down, stating that it is “investigating an incident with service in one of our regions” (this typographical error belongs to Bluesky, not us). The initial signs of trouble began at 1:42AM ET and were still ongoing as of 11AM when this report was created. Since that time, users have reported intermittent interruptions, including accessing the status page, which is designed to inform users about service outages.
At 7:47PM ET, Bluesky provided further insight into the situation, revealing that it has been working to mitigate a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack that has escalated throughout the day.” This attack has resulted in various disruptions affecting users’ feeds, notifications, threads, and search functionalities, which the team at Engadget has experienced firsthand at multiple times throughout the day. Although DDoS attacks are often employed as decoys for more severe hacks, Bluesky has asserted that it has “not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private user data.” Notably, the social media platform faced another brief outage earlier this month.
The outage continues to persist, but due to its sporadic nature, it resembles a rolling blackout rather than a full-scale power outage. Bluesky has committed to providing another update regarding the situation by 1PM ET on April 17.
Update, April 16, 8PM ET: This article has been revised after publication to include the latest information regarding the outage from Bluesky.
Ethan Carter
