Yesterday’s Bluesky Outage Was No Accident
Since early Thursday morning, Bluesky has been experiencing intermittent downtime. It is of course not uncommon for a platform to experience outages. If you log into Downdetector from time to time, you’ll see how often users of websites large and small report problems with the service. In most cases, a bug or small issue has ruined the work behind the scenes, and it doesn’t take long for the platform’s engineers to locate the problem and release a fix: the downtime is over. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with Bluesky, at least not this time.
Bluesky was hit by a DDoS attack
On Thursday at 7:47 p.m., Bluesky posted an update on its official Bluesky page. The post said the outages occurred starting at 11:40 p.m. PT Wednesday (2:40 a.m. ET Thursday), which the platform attributes to “a sophisticated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.” Bluesky says the attack “intensified” throughout Thursday, explaining the intermittent nature of the outage.
This does not necessarily mean that Bluesky was hacked or that user information was compromised in the attack. In fact, Bluesky confirmed Thursday evening that it had no evidence of unauthorized access to user data. In a DDoS attack, an actor floods a service’s network with traffic, to overwhelm that network and cause service interruptions. It’s like Bluesky is suddenly the platform everyone wants to go to to talk about how you can now block Shorts on YouTube: all that traffic makes it difficult for the website to function properly.
As of the date of this article, Bluesky appears to be fully operational. I have no issues accessing my feeds on the site and the Bluesky service status site reports no issues. That said, the company plans to release another update on the attack and its outages today at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET).
What do you think of it so far?
Is there anything Bluesky users should do?
For now, the answer appears to be no. Bluesky said it believes no private user data was accessed, meaning your account data is likely secure. However, if the company releases an update to the contrary, I will be sure to update this article and include instructions on what to do to strengthen your account’s defenses.
