Bluesky Hit by Sophisticated DDoS Attack, Services Disrupted
Bluesky, the social media platform, is currently battling a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which has caused intermittent outages and disruptions to its services. Despite the issue, the company has assured users that their private data remains secure.
Bluesky's website and app have been struggling to load, with users experiencing errors and slow performance. The company confirmed the DDoS attack on Thursday evening, attributing the issue to a sophisticated cyberattack that started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
The attack, which involves overwhelming the app or website with large amounts of junk web traffic, has caused disruptions to users' feeds, notifications, threads, and search. However, Bluesky has stated that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data.
Our team received a report of intermittent app outages at about 11:40pm PDT on April 15, 2026. They worked through the night to mitigate the attack, which intensified throughout the day.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was impacting its operations. Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
The network's status page is currently not working, however, and users are experiencing intermittent loading times and error messages. For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, "This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded."
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team's feed often see this problem, even as users' own personal feeds are functional. Other times, like when trying to visit a user's profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, "oof, our services are getting pretty hard tonight." Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities running their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network appear to be functioning for the time being.
It was clear that Bluesky's team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: "investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic]."
Timeline of Events
- April 15, 2026: Intermittent app outages reported at 11:40pm PDT
- April 16, 2026: Bluesky's team worked through the night to mitigate the DDoS attack
- April 16, 2026: The attack intensified throughout the day
- April 17, 2026: Bluesky confirms DDoS attack as the cause of service interruptions
Status Update
Bluesky has assured users that their private data remains secure and is working to resolve the issue. The company will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.