Bluesky Reviews The Outage Cause To Be A DDoS Attack

Yesterday, Bluesky experienced an outage in which Downdetector observed a high rise in thousands at around 6:30am ET, and as of 2:28pm, there were large recoveries, which were observed to be resolved, and this had been linked all through, which made the incident intermittent.

The application, which is regarded as the substitute and alternative to X, formerly Twitter, with the Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang, who had blamed the ongoing hack for Bluesky’s website and app being continued problems on Friday.

The social media business further revealed on Thursday night that the problems, which had initially begun on April 15th at around 8:40 p.m. ET, were caused by a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.”

Attacks known as distributed denial-of-service frequently entail flooding websites or applications with a lot of unsolicited traffic in an effort to overload and take down their servers. Even if these cyberattacks don’t entail system invasions, they can nevertheless cause problems for the business and its customers.

The firm explained the reason behind the issue and mentioned that the attack was “impacting its operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search” in a post on the Bluesky account.

However, Bluesky stated that it has not observed any proof of illegal access to personal information.

Bluesky only directed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates when we first contacted them for comment on Thursday. An expected time for a fix was not given by the company.

However, the network’s status page isn’t functioning right now.

By 1 p.m. ET on Friday, Bluesky promised to offer another update on the attack’s progress and response.

The website and app may on occasion load slowly due to the unpredictable and sporadic outages, and some other times error messages will appear by popping up unknowingly.

In an instance, a notification stating, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable,” might appear when you switch to a specific feed within the app. Please give it another go later. The server sent the message, “Rate Limit Exceeded.”

While users’ personal feeds are operational, popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed frequently experience this issue.

In other situations, such as when attempting to see a user’s profile, the website will show an error notice, requiring you to reload and try again.

Around 3:46 a.m., Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold made a comment. “Oof, our services are getting pretty hard tonight,” said ET on Wednesday.

Bluesky is particularly affected by the service interruptions, but other communities, such as Blacksky, that manage their own infrastructure using the core protocol that drives the decentralized social network continue to operate.

Due to the promotion of its services by customers, developers, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky, Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has caused a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the last 12 hours.

The fact that one of the messages on Bluesky’s status page contained a typo, “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic],” demonstrated how busy the team was this week dealing with these problems.

The attack is being aggressively mitigated by engineers. As restoration work continues with an ongoing effort to close the case, the business intended to publish a significant status update by 1 p.m. ET on April 17, 2026.

This incident comes after a string of brief outages earlier in April, some of which were ascribed to “port exhaustion” due to the platform’s inability to accommodate its quickly expanding user base.

You can follow updates from the official Bluesky team or visit the Bluesky Status Page for real-time monitoring.