- Bluesky experienced a significant outage on Thursday, affecting users for almost an hour.
- The issue was a result of a major problem with the PDS (Personal Data Server) networking.
- However, users who were using different Bluesky infrastructure's were not affected by this issue.
Bluesky, the relatively popular X (formerly Twitter) alternative, gained its biggest name to fame was its decentralized nature. This ensures there is no single point of failure. This is unlike other services, where all the data is stored in one spot. Despite this, Bluesky experienced a significant outage on Thursday, leaving many users unable to access the Bluesky app or website for almost an hour.
The Bluesky’s status page showed a message at 6:55 PM Eastern Time, which mentioned, “major PDS networking problems,” followed by “we are investigating a major outage with Bluesky hosted PDS instances.” Here, PDS stands for Personal Data Server.
Soon after, at 7:38 PM Eastern Time, there was another message. This said, “We have identified a likely root cause and are rolling out a fix to the Bluesky PDS fleet”. Even Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee shared a post at 7:54 PM stating, “Okay we are back. Very sorry for the outage everyone. We’re still clearing out the situation. Will keep you updated”.
However, this had many Bluesky users wondering, how could a decentralized network go down? The reason, as discussed by TechCrunch, seems to be that many of its users access Bluesky using the official app, which is powered by the AT protocol. And the decentralized nature allows anyone to build their own infrastructure, given the recent success of the service, few have done so.
Those who have their own infrastructure weren’t affected by the outage. But as more infrastructures grow, problems like these will become fewer and far between. This outage also allowed Mastodon (another decentralized X alternative) users who took jabs at Bluesky for their failure.
