Since Thursday morning, Bluesky has been experiencing intermittent downtime. Of course, it’s not unusual for a platform to experience an outage. If you check in with DownDetector from time to time, you’ll see how often users of large and small websites report problems with the service. In most cases, some bug or small issue has screwed up the functions behind the scenes, and it doesn’t take long for the platform’s engineers to figure out the problem and release a solution: the downtime is over. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with Bluesky—at least not this time.
Bluesky was attacked by DDoS
Thursday 7:47 pmblue sky Posted an update on their official Bluesky page. The post said the outage was reported starting at 11:40 p.m. PT on Wednesday (2:40 a.m. ET on Thursday), which the platform attributes to “a sophisticated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.” Bluesky says the attack “intensified” on Thursday, making the up-and-down nature of the outage clear.
Now, this doesn’t mean that Bluesky was necessarily hacked, or that user information was compromised in the attack. Actually, Bluesky confirmed this on Thursday evening It had no evidence of unauthorized access to user data. In a DDoS attack, An actor floods a service’s network with trafficPutting pressure on that network and causing disruption in service. It’s as if Bluesky suddenly became the platform where everyone in the world wanted to talk about how you can now block shorts on YouTube: all this traffic makes it difficult for the website to run properly.
As of this writing, Bluesky appears to be fully functional. I have no trouble accessing my feed on the site, and bluesky service status site Reports no problems. That said, the company plans to release another update on the attack and its outage by 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) today.
What do you think so far?
Is there anything Bluesky users need to do?
At this time, the answer appears to be no. BlueSky has said that it believes no private user data was accessed, which means your account data is likely safe. However, if the company releases an update to the contrary, I will be sure to update this section, and include instructions on what to do to strengthen the security of your account.
