Yesterday's Bluesky Outage Was No Accident
Since early Thursday morning, Bluesky has been experiencing intermittent downtime. It's not unusual for a platform to go through outages, of course. If you check in with Downdetector every now and then, you'll see how often users of websites big and small report issues with the service. In most cases, some bug or small issue has gummed up the works behind the scenes, and it doesn't take long for the platform's engineers locate the problem and issue a fix: downtime over. But that doesn't seem to be the case with Bluesky—at least, not this time.
Bluesky was hit with a DDoS attack
On Thursday at 7:47 p.m., Bluesky posted an update on its official Bluesky page. The post says the reports of outages occurred starting 11:40 p.m. PT on Wednesday (2:40 a.m. ET on Thursday), which the platform attributes to "a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack." Bluesky says the attack "intensified" throughout Thursday, explaining the up and down nature of the outage.
Now, this doesn't mean Bluesky was necessarily hacked, or that user information was compromised in the attack. In fact, Bluesky confirmed Thursday evening that it had no evidence of unauthorized access to user data. In a DDoS attack, an actor floods a service's network with traffic, to overwhelm that network and cause interruptions to service. It's as if Bluesky was suddenly the platform everyone in the world wanted to go to talk about how you can now block Shorts on YouTube: All that traffic makes it difficult for the website to run properly.
As of this article, Bluesky appears to be fully operational. I have no trouble accessing my feeds on the site, and the Bluesky service status site reports no issues. That said, the company is planning on issuing another update on the attack and its outages by 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) today.
Is there anything Bluesky users need to do?
At this time, the answer appears to be no. Bluesky has said it believes no private user data was accessed, which means your account data is likely secure. However, if the company issues an update to the contrary, I'll be sure to update this piece, and include instructions on what to do to shore up your account's defenses.