Bluesky’s website and app continued to face difficulties on Friday following service disruptions caused by a cyberattack, as stated by chief operating officer Rose Wang. The company acknowledged on Thursday evening that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was responsible, beginning on Wednesday, April 15, 2026, at about 8:40 pm ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks typically target apps or websites with excessive junk web traffic to overwhelm and shut down their servers. Although these attacks don’t involve system breaches, they can disrupt operations for the company and users.
Bluesky’s team reported intermittent app outages around 11:40 pm PDT on April 15, 2026. They worked tirelessly to manage the DDoS attack, which grew more severe through the day.
A message on Bluesky’s account explained that the attack was affecting their services, causing intermittent service interruptions across feeds, notifications, threads, and searches. The company noted there was no evidence of unauthorized access to private data.
Bluesky’s status page is currently inaccessible. Initially, when asked for a comment on Thursday, Bluesky referred to their status page and account for updates but didn’t provide a fix timeline. They promised an additional update on the attack and mitigation status by 1 PM ET.
Due to intermittent outages, Bluesky’s site and app sometimes load slowly or display error messages. Users might encounter messages like, “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 or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often face these issues, although users’ personal feeds typically remain accessible. Visiting a user’s profile may sometimes result in an error message requiring users to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold noted around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting pretty hard tonight.”
Importantly, while the disruptions affect Bluesky, other communities running on the underlying protocol appear operational currently. During this challenging week, a message on Bluesky’s status page included a typo: “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”