From around 6:00 to 7:00 AM ET, popular social media network Bluesky was experiencing server-side outages that prevented posts and timelines from appearing.
Users were reporting problems with Bluesky that effectively rendered the platform unusable. Downtime was affecting servers in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Bluesky had seen a 763% rise in users in 2024, boosting its popularity towards the end of the year, while user-party Windows 11 desktop apps for Bluesky stood in for the lack of any official options for PCs, including one built by a Microsoft engineer.
This story was developing, but it seems that Bluesky is back online, despite a minor blip in the first hour of its return.
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky is a social media platform similar to X (Twitter) and Meta's Threads. Its unique feature uses the "AT Protocol" (Authenticated Transfer) to connect multiple services into one platform, allowing users to use the same handle across different servers.
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Downtime reports skyrocket for Bluesky
Bluesky is reporting "Some systems down" and it seems to be affecting major servers feeding content to the United States and part of Europe.
Are your timelines blank? I have tried switching regions with a VPN, but nothing has loaded for the past thirty minutes.
"BlueSky down again" — Reddit reacts
The outages at BlueSky are widespread, and Redditors are venting their frustration.
"Yeah. So often recently" says MapleLotus96 as others report downtime in Italy, Korea, and Portgual.
Is per-server downtime affecting AT Protocol?
The following systems appear to be causing the widespread outages with separate downtime:
- api.events.bsky.app
- coral.us-east.host.bsky.network/xrpc/_health
- cordyceps.us-west.host.bsky.network/xrpc/_health
- cremini.us-west.host.bsky.network/xrpc/_health (seems to be recovering)
- gomphus.us-west.host.bsky.network/xrpc/_health
- inkcap.us-east.host.bsky.network
- lepista.us-west.host.bsky.network
- morel.us-east.host.bsky.network
- puffball.us-east.host.bsky.network
Worldwide downtime
Decentralization hasn't helped Bluesky's outages from affecting only a small portion of users, as more report problems in Australia and Canada.
Switching global regions with a VPN shows the same for me — no content loads in any location, though the website itself remains live with HTML code and CSS stylings operational.
Bluesky's official status page still reads "Some systems down" while we wait.
Back in action
Everything seems to have recovered as Bluesky reports "All systems Operational", and timelines are appearing with new posts.
Total downtime was a little over an hour, and the platform appears to be operating as expected. No official word as to what caused the downtime yet.
