Bluesky suffers temporary outage despite decentralised design

Outage blamed on networking issue affecting core infrastructure

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Decentralised social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to access the service via web or mobile for nearly an hour.

The platform attributed the disruption to “major PDS networking problems”, referencing its personal data server infrastructure.

According to updates posted on Bluesky’s status page, the outage began at 6:55 p.m. ET. A fix was in progress by 7:38 p.m. ET, and service was soon restored.

The incident sparked questions about how a decentralised platform could suffer such a disruption.

Although Bluesky operates on the AT Protocol—a decentralised networking framework—the bulk of its user base still relies on infrastructure maintained by Bluesky itself, including its core PDS components.

Users who independently run components of the AT Protocol were reportedly unaffected, highlighting that the platform’s decentralisation is still in early implementation stages.

In the long term, Bluesky envisions a diverse ecosystem of communities with their own infrastructure, moderation systems, and client applications.

However, the current centralisation of services means outages impacting Bluesky’s servers can still disrupt large swathes of users.

The outage reignited rivalry with Mastodon, another decentralised platform operating on the ActivityPub protocol.

Mastodon users mocked Bluesky’s temporary failure, with one remarking that their home-run server “just keeps chugging along”.

Despite the incident, Bluesky resumed full functionality shortly after the issue was addressed. The platform has reiterated its commitment to decentralisation and building a resilient, distributed infrastructure in future iterations.