Decentralized social networks are not immune to downtime.
Bluesky, a decentralized social network, experienced a significant outage on Thursday evening, leaving users unable to access the app on web and mobile devices for about an hour. The company attributed the outage to “Major PDS Networking Problems,” as stated on Bluesky’s status page.
Initial status messages were posted at 6:55 PM ET, with a follow-up indicating that a fix was being applied at 7:38 PM ET.
Despite being decentralized, most Bluesky users interact with the service through the official app, powered by the AT Protocol. While anyone can theoretically run the various protocol components, such as PDS and relays, few have done so as the social network is still in its early stages.
Those who had set up their own infrastructure were not affected by the outage.
Bluesky aims to host diverse communities with their infrastructure, moderation tools, and client applications. The hope is to have multiple entities support applications built on the AT Protocol in the future.
The outage prompted comparisons with Mastodon, another decentralized social network using the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon users were quick to make light of Bluesky’s downtime and its approach to decentralization.
In the end, Bluesky resolved the outage swiftly, and the service is now operational.
