Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that COO Rose Wang attributed to a denial-of-service attack. On Thursday evening, the company officially confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on Wednesday, April 15, 2026, around 8:40 pm ET.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
The company said that it has not seen any evidecne of unauthorized access to private data, however.
The network’s status page is also currently not working.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display 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.”
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not comment on an ETA for a fix.
The company today says it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation on April 17 at 1 PM ET.
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].”
