Bluesky’s website and app are still up struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions, Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang is attributed in an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday afternoon, the social media company confirmed that the issues were blamed on a “sophisticated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack,” which was originally launched on April 15 around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial of service attacks often involve hitting applications or websites with large amounts of unwanted web traffic in order to overload and disconnect its servers. While these types of cyber attacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing periodic service interruptions for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
However, Bluesky said it has seen no evidence of unauthorized access to personal data.
When initially reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky indicated only that status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for repair.
The network status page but for now it is not working.
Bluesky said it would provide an update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1pm ET on Friday.
Because outages are periodic, the Bluesky website and app will at times load slowly and at other times display error messages.
For example, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says: “This feed is currently receiving heavy traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rating limit exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky team feed often experience this problem, even when users’ personal feeds are functional.
Other times, such as when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold observed around 3:46 am ET on Wednesday, “ugh, our services are hitting pretty hard tonight.”
In particular, service interruptions affect Bluesky, but also other communities such as Blackskythat run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, still work.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that Bluesky’s shutdown led to a “significant uptick” immigration requests by Bluesky users in the last 12 hours, such as users, programmersand other founders of ATmosphere such as Sebastian at Eurosky promote its services.
It was clear that the Bluesky team was in a state of flux this week while dealing with these issues, as a message on their status page had a typo: “investigating a service incident in one of our regions [sic].”
