Hackers Shut Down Bluesky For Much of Thursday

Bluesky is now back online after it was hacked and shut down for much of Thursday, disrupting service for millions. The burgeoning social media platform faced its biggest stability test, leaving millions staring at empty feeds and error pages.

In what is being described as a rolling blackout, the decentralized social media platform Bluesky suffered a massive service disruption on Thursday, April 16, 2026. For much of the day, users globally found themselves locked out of the app or unable to load their feeds.

While the site is now back online, this outage marks a significant hurdle for the platform as it continues to position itself as the primary competitor and alternative to Twitter (X).

Our team received a report of intermittent app outages at about 11:40pm PDT on April 15, 2026. They worked through the night to mitigate a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which intensified throughout the day.

— Bluesky (@bsky.app) 2026-04-16T23:47:25.963Z

According to technical post-mortems provided by the Bluesky team, the outage wasn’t just a simple hiccup. Hackers targeted the platform with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, flooding the site with tens of thousands of access requests that overwhelmed its upstream service providers.

The attack triggered a cascade of technical failures, most notably ephemeral port exhaustion. Essentially, the platform’s infrastructure ran out of available network connections to handle the massive surge of traffic, causing the service to buckle under the weight of the digital onslaught.

At the height of the disruption, Downdetector received over 60,000 reports of issues, including feeds failing to load, posts vanishing into the void after posting, and thousands reporting being unable to log in to the mobile app or web interface.

This isn’t the first time the platform struggled with its own growth. A similar disruption occurred earlier this month, highlighting the ongoing growing pains of scaling a decentralized network.

Despite frustrations, Bluesky has been praised for its transparency, providing detailed updates even when their own official status pages were being hammered by the attack. As the exodus of Twitter users continues to drive toward the blue butterfly, the question of Bluesky’s infrastructure keeping up with its own popularity remains.