Bluesky, the decentralized social media platform often seen as a rival to X, experienced partial service disruptions on Thursday, April 16, 2026.
Users began reporting issues around 2:42 a.m. ET, with the platform’s website and mobile app loading slowly or displaying error messages.
Many encountered “Rate Limit Exceeded” alerts when trying to switch feeds, particularly popular ones like Discover or the official Bluesky Team feed. Personal feeds sometimes worked, but accessing user profiles often required multiple refreshes.
Bluesky COO Rose Wang attributed the problems to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. In a post on the platform, she confirmed the ongoing interruptions. Protocol engineer Bryan Newbold also acknowledged the strain, posting early in the incident that services were “getting pretty hard tonight.”
The outage appeared partial rather than total. Logins generally succeeded, and some core functions remained accessible, but feed delivery and profile views were heavily impacted for many users globally. Bluesky’s status page (status.bsky.app) noted investigations into service issues in one of its regions, with mentions of connection timeouts and downed servers in areas including the US East. Other communities built on Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol seemed unaffected.
Downdetector and similar sites recorded spikes in reports, peaking in the thousands during the morning hours. As of the TechCrunch report at 10:11 a.m. PDT, problems persisted with no clear resolution timeline provided. Bluesky had not responded to requests for further comment.
The incident highlights the growing pains of Bluesky as its user base expands. While the platform has positioned itself as a more open alternative in the social media landscape, scaling infrastructure against attacks and high traffic remains a challenge.
Users are advised to check Bluesky’s official status page for the latest updates. At the time of writing, full recovery had not been confirmed.
