Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages

Source: TechCrunch

Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.

Outage Overview

• The issues began on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
• On Thursday evening, Bluesky confirmed that a sophisticated Distributed Denial‑of‑Service (DDoS) attack was to blame.
• The attack has caused intermittent interruptions for feeds, notifications, threads, and search.

Nature of the Attack

Distributed denial‑of‑service attacks involve flooding an app or website with large amounts of junk traffic to overload servers. While they do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, they can still be highly disruptive for both the service provider and its users.

Bluesky has reported no evidence of unauthorized access to private data.

Impact on Users

• The network’s status page (status.bsky.app) is currently not working.

• Users experience intermittent loading, slow responses, or error messages such as:

  “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”

• Popular feeds (e.g., Discover or the official Bluesky Team feed) are often affected, while personal feeds may remain functional.

• Visiting a user’s profile can also trigger error messages that require a refresh.

Example Screenshots

Image Credit: screenshot of Bluesky

Image Credit: screenshot of Bluesky

Image Credit: screenshot of Bluesky

Responses from Bluesky

• When initially reached for comment, Bluesky directed inquiries to the status page and its status account (@status.bsky.app).
• No estimated time for a fix was provided.
• Bluesky pledged another update on the attack’s mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
• A typo on the status page read: “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”

Impact on Other Communities

• Other communities built on the same decentralized protocol, such as Blacksky, remain functional.
• Blacksky reported a significant spike in migration requests from Bluesky users, developers, and founders (e.g., Sebastian at Eurosky) over the past 12 hours.

Image Credit: screenshot of Bluesky

Additional Notes

• Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday: “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”

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All links and references are preserved as in the original article.