Bluesky outages continued after overnight disruptions

April 17, 2026

Summary

Bluesky said service problems that began early Thursday continued into the afternoon, affecting parts of its app and website.

Why this matters

The outages disrupted access to Bluesky’s app and website, affecting users trying to view feeds and profiles. The incident also highlighted that services built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol may continue operating even when Bluesky itself has problems.

Bluesky’s website and app continued to have problems Thursday after service interruptions that Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang attributed to a denial-of-service attack.

According to the company’s status page, the issues began around 2:42 a.m. ET and continued into the afternoon.

At times, Bluesky’s site and app loaded slowly. At other times, they showed error messages.

In the app, switching to some feeds displayed a message that said: “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”

Popular feeds, including Discover and the official Bluesky Team feed, were affected, though some users’ personal feeds still loaded.

Attempts to visit some user profiles also produced error messages that required users to refresh and try again.

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

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On Thursday evening, the company said a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was behind the issues, which began April 15 at about 8:40 p.m. ET. Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang attributed the interruptions to an ongoing cyberattack.

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Bluesky said a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack caused service disruptions that continued Friday, affecting its website and app.

In a post on its Bluesky account, the company said the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.” Bluesky said it had not seen evidence of unauthorized access to private data.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks typically flood apps or websites with traffic intended to overload servers and knock services offline. Bluesky did not provide an estimated time for a fix when reached for comment Thursday, directing inquiries to its status page and status account for updates. Its status page was later unavailable.

Bluesky said it would provide another update on the attack and mitigation efforts by 1 p.m. ET Friday.

The disruptions were intermittent. At times, the site and app loaded slowly; at others, they showed error messages. In the app, some users saw: “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.” Popular feeds such as Discover and the official Bluesky Team feed were often affected, even when users’ personal feeds were working.

The site also sometimes showed an error message when users tried to visit a profile, requiring a refresh.

Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold wrote at about 3:46 a.m. ET Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”

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