Bluesky Down: Why Did the Decentralized Social Network Fail?

Decentralized Social Networks Are Not Immune to Outages

Even decentralized social networks are susceptible to downtime, as recently demonstrated by Bluesky.

A significant outage affected the Bluesky network on Thursday evening, preventing users from accessing the platform via web and mobile applications for approximately one hour. The company acknowledged the issue on its status page, attributing it to “Major PDS Networking Problems,” where PDS stands for personal data servers.

Outage Details and Response

The initial status update was published at 6:55 p.m. ET, followed by a subsequent message at 7:38 p.m. ET indicating that a solution was being implemented.

This incident raises questions about the inherent resilience of decentralized systems. Is decentralization meant to eliminate single points of failure?

The Reality of Decentralization in Practice

Despite its decentralized design, a large proportion of Bluesky users currently rely on the official app, which operates using the AT Protocol.

While the AT Protocol theoretically allows anyone to operate the necessary infrastructure – including PDS, relays, and other components – the network is still in its early stages, and widespread independent operation remains limited.

Notably, users who did operate their own infrastructure were unaffected by the outage.

Future Vision for Bluesky

The long-term vision for Bluesky involves the development of numerous communities, each potentially managing its own infrastructure, moderation policies, and client applications.

The Blacksky team, for example, is actively working to establish safer and more inclusive online environments leveraging these decentralized capabilities.

Ultimately, Bluesky aims to become one of many entities contributing to the infrastructure supporting the expanding ecosystem of applications built on the AT Protocol.

However, in the immediate future, disruptions to Bluesky’s core infrastructure will have a widespread impact.

Rivalry with Mastodon

The outage sparked some playful rivalry with Mastodon, another decentralized social network utilizing the ActivityPub protocol.

Mastodon users quickly seized the opportunity to highlight the incident, making light of Bluesky’s approach to decentralization.

One Mastodon user, Luke Johnson, commented, “See how the mighty Bluesky crumbles while the Raspberry Pi running Mastodon under my bed just keeps chugging along,” emphasizing Mastodon’s ability to run on minimal hardware.

Another user sarcastically remarked, “nice decentralisation ya got there.”

Resolution and Cause of the Outage

Service was restored shortly after the outage began, and Bluesky is now fully operational.

Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee later confirmed that the personal data servers (PDS) were targeted by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks – malicious attempts to overwhelm a server with traffic.

Other PDS instances were not affected. The origin of the attack remains unidentified, but the prevailing theory suggests it was unintentional, stemming from a third party.

Note: This article was updated to reflect the confirmation of the DDoS attack.