Bluesky’s Hour-Long Outage Sparks Debate on Decentralisation
- Bluesky’s outage was caused by problems with its core personal data servers, affecting most users for nearly an hour.
- Although built to be decentralised, most users still depend on Bluesky’s central infrastructure, making widespread outages possible.
- Mastodon users mocked Bluesky’s outage, highlighting differences in how decentralised networks operate.
On Thursday evening, decentralised social network Bluesky suffered a significant outage, leaving users unable to access the app or website for nearly an hour.
The disruption, which began at 6:55 PM ET and was resolved by 7:38 PM ET, was attributed to “Major PDS Networking Problems”—issues with the platform’s core personal data servers (PDS).
The incident sparked debate about how a decentralised service could experience such a failure. While Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, allowing anyone to run their infrastructure, most users still rely on Bluesky’s official app and servers.
As a result, when the central PDS infrastructure encountered problems, the majority of the community was affected.
Newsletter
The corridor, every morning.
Funding rounds and cross-border capital moves, one email, five minutes.
Notably, users who had set up independent PDS servers continued to access the network without interruption, demonstrating the resilience possible with full decentralisation.
The outage reignited rivalry with Mastodon, another decentralised platform running on the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon users were quick to poke fun at Bluesky’s reliance on central servers, with one quipping, “see how the mighty Bluesky crumbles while the Raspberry Pi running Mastodon under my bed just keeps chugging along”.
Bluesky has since restored service and reiterated its commitment to a future where many independent communities run their infrastructure. For now, however, the platform’s reliance on its core servers means outages can still have a widespread impact.
Edited by Annette George
More in Social Media
