Bluesky blames DDoS attack for server outages

Source: Engadget

Incident Overview

Bluesky experienced another service disruption. The platform reported that some systems were down and that it was “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos” (a typo in Bluesky’s statement). The issue began at 1:42 AM ET and was still ongoing at 11 AM when the story was first published. Since then, the site has faced intermittent interruptions, including occasional outages of its status page, which users rely on to monitor service health.

Timeline

• 1:42 AM ET – Outage begins.
• 7:47 PM ET – Bluesky announces it is attempting to mitigate “a sophisticated Distributed Denial‑of‑Service (DDoS) attack, which intensified throughout the day.”
• 8:00 PM ET (April 16) – Update added to the story noting the ongoing outage.

Impact

The DDoS attack caused interruptions to:

• Users’ feeds
• Notifications
• Threads
• Search

The Engadget team experienced these issues firsthand at various points throughout the day.

Bluesky emphasized that, while DDoS attacks are sometimes used as smokescreens for hacks, it has “not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private user data.”

Response and Next Steps

Bluesky described the outage as a “rolling blackout” rather than a complete power outage due to its intermittent nature. The company pledged to provide another update by 1 PM ET on April 17.