Bluesky says DDoS attack caused service outages

April 18, 2026

Summary

Bluesky said a DDoS attack caused intermittent outages affecting feeds, search, notifications, and other core features.

Why this matters

The disruptions affected access to key Bluesky features and prompted some users to seek alternatives on services built on the same protocol. The incident also highlights that DDoS attacks can disrupt service even without evidence of unauthorized access to user data.

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.”

The disruptions affected Bluesky, but Blacksky and other communities running their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol remained operational. Blacksky told TechCrunch the Bluesky outage led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the previous 12 hours, as users, developers, and other ATmosphere founders, including Sebastian at Eurosky, promoted its services.

One status-page message during the incident included a typo, saying Bluesky was “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”

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