On Thursday evening, Bluesky, the new decentralized social network, was down for a major outage. This meant users were unable to use the app on both the web and mobile platforms for nearly one full hour. The first status message reporting the issue was posted at 6:55 PM ET, followed by an update at 7:38 PM ET indicating that a fix was being implemented.
The unfortunate outage still brings to light how there can be vulnerabilities under even decentralized services such as Bluesky. Though this platform can host many communities, each with their own unique infrastructure, moderation services, and client applications. Meet the Blacksky team working alongside Bluesky’s decentralized tools to foster safer, more inclusive online spaces. It’s their focus on flexibility that moves this critical mission from ambition to action.
Throughout the entire period of downtime, users inundated other social media platforms with their complaints and anger. Luke Johnson, a user on the decentralized social network Mastodon, had a scathing reaction to the incident. He punctuated that with the alarming difference between Bluesky’s behavior versus smaller, user-configured instances.
“See how the mighty Bluesky crumbles while the Raspberry Pi running Mastodon under my bed just keeps chugging along.” – Luke Johnson
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The recent outage raises questions about the reliability of decentralized platforms, especially as they aim to provide alternatives to traditional social media. Through their work, Bluesky hopes to inspire the creation of resilient, vibrant, and independent communities. As this incident demonstrates, there are unforeseen technical challenges that may crop up in the process.
As users await a full resolution and return to normal functionality, the incident may spark further discussions about the resilience of decentralized systems compared to their centralized counterparts.