Bluesky social media platform hit by DDoS attack, causing widespread outage

The social media platform Bluesky experienced a widespread outage on Thursday after being targeted by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Company officials confirmed the attack in a thread posted to the official Bluesky profile. The platform's team first received reports of intermittent outages at approximately 11:40 p.m. PDT on April 15 and worked through the night to mitigate what they described as a "sophisticated" DDoS attack that intensified throughout the following day. The attack affected multiple aspects of the Bluesky service, including the main application, user feeds, notifications, and search functionality. Despite the disruption, the company stated there was no evidence that any user data was compromised during the incident. Bluesky's status page indicated the service had been fully restored as of the time of reporting. The platform maintains a 99.983 percent uptime record over the past 90 days, according to company metrics. DownDetector, a service that tracks online outages, recorded thousands of user error reports during the incident. The monitoring service is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable, which first reported the outage details. DDoS attacks involve overwhelming a target's servers with massive volumes of traffic, making services inaccessible to legitimate users. While considered a relatively low-effort tactic for cybercriminals, such attacks continue to pose significant operational challenges for online platforms. Bluesky has experienced substantial user growth following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and again after the second election of President Donald Trump, though recent data indicates daily active user numbers have since declined. The company said it would provide additional information about the attack by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.