Bluesky Remains Unstable Thursday Onward Widespread Denial-of-Service Outage

Bluesky’s website and mobile application remained unstable on Thursday, days after the decentralized social platform suffered widespread service disruptions that Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang has attributed to a large denial-of-service (DoS) attack.

According to Bluesky’s official status page, the issues first emerged around 2:42 a.m. ET on Thursday and have persisted continuously since they began.

At present, the Bluesky site and app only work intermittently: the platform loads occasionally, albeit at very slow speeds, while users are frequently hit with error messages during other attempts to access content. For example, when switching to a specific feed within the app, many users see a notification that reads: “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”

High-traffic popular feeds, including the Discover feed and the official Bluesky Team feed, are most commonly affected by this error, though many users report their personal curated feeds are still able to load in most cases. Other common failures include full error pages when users attempt to access another user’s profile, forcing a manual refresh and a second attempt to load the content.

Roughly an hour after outages first started, around 3:46 a.m. ET, Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold acknowledged the severity of the issue, writing, “oof, our services are getting pretty hard tonight.”

When reached for additional comment on the incident, Bluesky only directed requests for updates to its official status page at status.bsky.app and its associated update account (@status.bsky.app). The company declined to share further comment on the attack’s root cause or an estimated timeline for a full fix.

While the main Bluesky hosted service has been heavily impacted by the ongoing disruptions, other independent communities that run their own separate infrastructure on the open underlying protocol that powers the decentralized network appear to remain fully functional for the time being.

Issues continued well into Thursday afternoon. As of the latest update, Bluesky’s status page confirms the team is “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic]” — the spelling error appears on the platform’s original status page, not in this reporting.