Bluesky Outage: How Did the Decentralized Network Go Down?

Bluesky Outage: A Look at Decentralized Downtime

Decentralized social networks are often touted for their resilience. Yet, on Thursday evening, Bluesky, the decentralized social media platform, experienced a significant outage. For roughly an hour, users were unable to access the app on both web and mobile devices.

Bluesky's status page attributed the outage to "Major PDS Networking Problems." PDS stands for personal data servers, a key component of Bluesky's architecture.

Why Did a Decentralized Network Fail?

The outage raises a key question: how can a decentralized network experience a single point of failure? While the AT Protocol powering Bluesky is designed for decentralized operation, most users currently access the network through Bluesky's official app and infrastructure. Although anyone can theoretically run their own PDS, relays, and other components, the network is still in its early stages, and few have done so.

Interestingly, those who were running their own infrastructure were unaffected by the outage.

The long-term vision for Bluesky involves numerous communities running their own infrastructure, moderation, and even client applications. Projects like Blacksky are already working towards this goal, creating safer and more inclusive online spaces using decentralized tools.

Eventually, Bluesky aims to be just one of many entities supporting the AT Protocol. However, in the short term, outages affecting Bluesky's infrastructure will impact a larger portion of the user base.

Rivalry with Mastodon

The outage fueled the ongoing rivalry between Bluesky and Mastodon, another decentralized social network built on the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon users quickly seized the opportunity to highlight the apparent irony of a decentralized network experiencing downtime.

See how the mighty Bluesky crumbles while the Raspberry Pi running Mastodon under my bed just keeps chugging along.

— Luke Johnson (Mastodon user)

Nice decentralization ya got there.

— Another Mastodon user

Despite the disruption, Bluesky resolved the outage shortly after it began, and the service is now back online.