Bluesky Decentralized Network Suffers Major Outage
**Bluesky Decentralized Network Experiences Major Outage, Sparking Debate on Decentralization**
NEW YORK – Bluesky, the decentralized social network, experienced a significant outage on Thursday evening, leaving users unable to access the app for approximately one hour. The outage, affecting both web and mobile users, was attributed to “Major PDS Networking Problems,” according to Bluesky’s status page. PDS refers to personal data servers. The initial status update was posted at 6:55 p.m. ET, with a subsequent message announcing a fix at 7:38 p.m. ET.
While Bluesky's architecture is decentralized, most users currently access the platform via the official Bluesky app, powered by the AT Protocol. Although theoretically anyone can run parts of the infrastructure, including PDS, relays, and other components, few currently do, thus creating a single point of failure in the current implementation. Users running their own infrastructure were unaffected by the outage. Bluesky aims to foster a more distributed network in the future, with numerous communities building their own infrastructure and client applications, but currently, an impact to Bluesky’s infrastructure affects a majority of its users.
The outage sparked comparisons with Mastodon, a decentralized social network utilizing the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon users highlighted the incident to underscore their network's resilience and decentralized nature. Some comments on Mastodon contrasted Bluesky’s centralized reliance on its own servers with Mastodon’s distributed server architecture, joking about the irony of a supposedly decentralized platform experiencing a widespread outage.
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee later confirmed that the outage stemmed from a DDoS attack targeting Bluesky’s personal data servers. While other PDSs remained unaffected, the source of the attack is yet to be identified, with the current hypothesis suggesting an accidental third-party incident. The service is now back online. Despite the incident, the outage underscores the challenges and ongoing development needed for decentralized social networks to achieve their full promise of resilience and distributed control.
NEW YORK – Bluesky, the decentralized social network, experienced a significant outage on Thursday evening, leaving users unable to access the app for approximately one hour. The outage, affecting both web and mobile users, was attributed to “Major PDS Networking Problems,” according to Bluesky’s status page. PDS refers to personal data servers. The initial status update was posted at 6:55 p.m. ET, with a subsequent message announcing a fix at 7:38 p.m. ET.
While Bluesky's architecture is decentralized, most users currently access the platform via the official Bluesky app, powered by the AT Protocol. Although theoretically anyone can run parts of the infrastructure, including PDS, relays, and other components, few currently do, thus creating a single point of failure in the current implementation. Users running their own infrastructure were unaffected by the outage. Bluesky aims to foster a more distributed network in the future, with numerous communities building their own infrastructure and client applications, but currently, an impact to Bluesky’s infrastructure affects a majority of its users.
The outage sparked comparisons with Mastodon, a decentralized social network utilizing the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon users highlighted the incident to underscore their network's resilience and decentralized nature. Some comments on Mastodon contrasted Bluesky’s centralized reliance on its own servers with Mastodon’s distributed server architecture, joking about the irony of a supposedly decentralized platform experiencing a widespread outage.
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee later confirmed that the outage stemmed from a DDoS attack targeting Bluesky’s personal data servers. While other PDSs remained unaffected, the source of the attack is yet to be identified, with the current hypothesis suggesting an accidental third-party incident. The service is now back online. Despite the incident, the outage underscores the challenges and ongoing development needed for decentralized social networks to achieve their full promise of resilience and distributed control.
