Bluesky experienced significant service disruptions starting early Wednesday morning as the decentralized social platform battled a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The outage began at 1:42 AM ET and persisted throughout the day, causing intermittent interruptions that affected multiple core functions of the platform.
The attack impacted users' feeds, notifications, threads, and search capabilities, with some users unable to access services while others experienced rolling blackouts. The platform's status page itself suffered intermittent downtime, making it difficult for users to track the ongoing incident. By evening, Bluesky's engineering team confirmed they had been working to mitigate what they described as an increasingly intensive DDoS assault that escalated throughout the day.
In a statement posted at 7:47 PM ET, Bluesky assured users that despite the service disruptions, there was no evidence of unauthorized access to private user data. The company emphasized that while DDoS attacks sometimes serve as cover for more serious security breaches, their investigation had found no signs of compromised accounts or stolen information.
This marks the second notable outage for the platform in recent weeks, highlighting infrastructure challenges as the service continues to attract users migrating from other social networks. The intermittent nature of Wednesday's disruption meant the platform remained partially functional rather than completely offline, though the experience was frustratingly inconsistent for users attempting to access the service.
Bluesky committed to providing an additional update on the situation by 1 PM ET on April 17, as engineers continued working to fully restore normal service and implement additional protections against future attacks. The incident underscores the growing pains facing emerging social platforms as they scale their infrastructure and contend with malicious actors targeting their systems.