Bluesky Outage: Decentralized Platform Experiences Downtime
The decentralized social media platform, Bluesky, experienced a significant outage on Thursday evening. Users were unable to access the app on web and mobile devices for approximately an hour.
Bluesky acknowledged the outage on its status page, attributing it to "Major PDS Networking Problems." PDS refers to personal data servers, a key component of Bluesky's architecture.
Why Did a Decentralized Network Go Down?
The outage raises questions about the nature of decentralized networks. While decentralization aims to eliminate single points of failure, Bluesky's outage demonstrates that challenges remain.
Currently, most Bluesky users access the platform through the official Bluesky app, which relies on the AT Protocol. Although the AT Protocol allows for distributed infrastructure, including independent PDS and relays, few users have implemented their own. This effectively created a central point of failure.
Users running their own AT Protocol infrastructure were unaffected by the outage.
The Future of Bluesky and Decentralization
Bluesky's long-term vision involves numerous communities operating their own infrastructure, moderation, and even client applications. Projects like Blacksky are already working to build safer online spaces using these decentralized tools.
Eventually, Bluesky aims to be just one of many entities supporting the AT Protocol. However, in the near term, outages affecting Bluesky's infrastructure will impact a larger portion of users.
Bluesky vs. Mastodon: The Decentralization Debate
The outage fueled comparisons between Bluesky and Mastodon, another decentralized social network using the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon users highlighted the incident to emphasize the differences in their approaches to decentralization.
“See how the mighty Bluesky crumbles while the Raspberry Pi running Mastodon under my bed just keeps chugging along.” - Luke Johnson (Mastodon user)
Another Mastodon user quipped, “Nice decentralization ya got there.”
Bluesky resolved the outage shortly after it began, and the service is now back online.
