Bluesky Hit by DoS Attack Causing Widespread Service Disruptions Across US and Europe

On April 16, 2026, Bluesky, the decentralized social media platform, experienced significant service disruptions attributed to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. Users across the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe reported difficulties accessing the platform, encountering error messages, and facing slow loading times.

The issues began around 2:42 a.m. Eastern Time, as noted on Bluesky’s status page. Users attempting to access the platform encountered messages such as This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded. These errors affected popular feeds like Discover and the official Bluesky Team’s feed, though some personal feeds remained accessible. Additionally, attempts to visit user profiles often resulted in error messages, necessitating page refreshes.

Bluesky’s protocol engineer, Bryan Newbold, acknowledged the severity of the situation, stating, oof, our services are getting pretty hard tonight. The company has not provided an official statement regarding the cause of the disruptions or an estimated time for resolution. However, Bluesky’s status page indicated ongoing investigations into service issues in one of their regions.

Despite the disruptions on Bluesky’s main platform, other communities operating on the underlying protocol appeared to function normally during this period.

Users expressed their frustrations on social media platforms, sharing screenshots of error messages and discussing the outage. One user reported, The pages were drawing a blank for me this morning and all of the search results don’t seem to be there. Another user shared, I don’t know, but I haven’t been able to get into Bluesky for a while, I think it might be down.

Bluesky, launched in February 2024, has rapidly grown its user base, reaching approximately 43 million users by March 2026. The platform was developed as an alternative to traditional social media networks, emphasizing decentralization and user control. This outage highlights the challenges decentralized platforms face in maintaining service stability and addressing security threats.

As of now, Bluesky has not provided a timeline for resolving the service disruptions. Users are advised to monitor the platform’s status page and official communications for updates.

In summary, Bluesky’s recent outage underscores the vulnerabilities even decentralized platforms can face from coordinated attacks. The incident serves as a reminder of the importance of robust security measures and transparent communication with users during service disruptions.

Bluesky users face service disruptions due to a DoS attack, causing error messages and slow loading times. #BlueskyDown #DoSAttack #SocialMediaOutage

Bluesky service disruption

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Category: Tech News