BlueSky’s website and app remained out of service on Friday, with Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang blaming it on an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday night, the social media company acknowledged that the issue was caused by an “advanced distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.” The attack originally began on April 15 at approximately 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often flood apps and websites with junk web traffic with the goal of overloading servers and knocking them offline. Although this type of cyberattack does not involve intrusion into a company’s systems, these incidents can still have a devastating impact on both the company and its users.
In a post on its Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the issue and said the attack was “impacting our operations, including intermittent service interruptions to our users’ feeds, notifications, threads, and searches.”
However, Brusky said he has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to personal data.
When first reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only provided the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for the fix.
However, the network status page is currently not working.
Bluesky said it would provide another update on the status of the attack and mitigation measures by 1pm ET on Friday.
Outages are intermittent and may cause Bluesky sites and apps to load slowly or display error messages.
For example, when you switch to a particular feed within the app, you may see a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving a high amount of traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate limit exceeded.”
Popular feeds such as Discover and the official Bluesky team feed often experience this issue, even when users’ own personal feeds are working.
Other times, such as when you try to access a user’s profile, the site may display an error message that requires you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Brian Newbold said around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “Oh, service is getting pretty difficult tonight.”
While the service disruption has particularly affected Bluesky, other communities running their own infrastructure on the underlying protocols that power decentralized social networks appear to be functioning for the time being.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was busy this week as they faced these issues. There was a typo in one of the messages on the status page. “We are investigating an incident regarding service in one of our regions.” [sic]”
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