Bluesky Suffers Widespread Outages Due to Sophisticated DDoS Attack

Bluesky, the decentralized social media platform, faced significant service disruptions beginning at 1:42 AM ET on April 16, with intermittent outages persisting throughout the day. The company initially reported an issue with "service in one of our reginos"—a typo for "regions."

The platform confirmed at 7:47 PM ET that it was mitigating a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which intensified over the course of the day. The attack disrupted users' feeds, notifications, threads, and search functionality, issues verified by the Engadget team.

While DDoS attacks are often used as distractions for more severe security breaches, Bluesky stated it had "not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private user data."

The social media service had previously experienced a brief outage earlier in April.

Latest Updates on the DDoS Attack and Service Status

In an update posted on April 17, Bluesky noted that the DDoS attacks were "ongoing" but reported that service had stabilized by approximately 9:00 PM PT the previous night. The company reiterated that there was still no evidence of compromised user data.

The next official update was scheduled to be released by the end of the day on Friday, April 18.

Timeline of Bluesky’s Outage and Recovery

• April 16, 1:42 AM ET: Outage begins, with intermittent service interruptions reported.
• April 16, 7:47 PM ET: Bluesky confirms a DDoS attack is causing widespread disruptions.
• April 16, 8:00 PM ET: Engadget updates the story with Bluesky’s official statement.
• April 17, 12:47 PM ET: Engadget updates the article with the latest outage information from Bluesky.
• April 17, 9:00 PM PT: Bluesky reports service stability, though attacks continue.
• April 18 (end of day): Next scheduled update from Bluesky.