Bluesky, the social media platform, has been facing significant disruptions due to a cyberattack, which its COO, Rose Wang, has identified as a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The issues began on April 15 and have continued to affect the site and app throughout Thursday and into Friday, preventing many users from accessing feeds, notifications, and other features.
DDoS attacks work by overwhelming a network with excessive internet traffic to make services unavailable, which can be a major inconvenience for users, even though they do not involve direct breaches of sensitive systems. Bluesky confirmed that while the attack has severely hampered its operations, there are no indications of unauthorized access to private user data.
The company’s disruption led to varied user experiences, with some feeds responding slowly or displaying error messages indicating high traffic. Popular sections, such as Discover and the official Bluesky Team feed, have been particularly affected, yet some individual user feeds remained operational.
Despite the ongoing chaos, Bluesky stated that other communities using the same underlying protocol for decentralised networking appear to be functioning without issues. In a revealing post, Bryan Newbold, a Bluesky protocol engineer, acknowledged the intensity of the situation while the site battled through unexpected outages.
The company has kept users informed via its status page, although it has experienced its own downtime, making it difficult for users to receive timely updates regarding the situation. On Friday, Bluesky promised another update on the incident by 1 p.m. ET, as the team actively works to mitigate the effects of the attack.
As the Bluesky team continues to respond to the crisis, it becomes evident that they are under considerable pressure, as seen in their frantic communications, which even contained a typo. Overall, the situation highlights the vulnerabilities that even robust digital infrastructures can encounter in the face of sophisticated cyber threats.
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