Why Did Decentralized Bluesky Go Down? Understanding the Recent Outage

Bluesky, the decentralized social network built on the AT Protocol, went down yesterday evening. Decentralized platforms can still go down.

The outage lasted about an hour and users couldn’t access the service through web or mobile apps. Bluesky confirmed the issue on their status page, “Major PDS Networking Problems”. PDS stands for personal data servers, a core part of it.

Bluesky is decentralized in theory, but most users still use the official app and infrastructure. So a problem with the main servers can still affect most users, even if others running their own setups were not.

The situation got some lighthearted jabs from Mastodon users, which runs on a different protocol called ActivityPub. One user said “Nice decentralization ya got there” and another “My Raspberry Pi Mastodon server never went down”.

Bluesky is still new. As it grows, more users and communities will run their own infrastructure and minimize the impact. But for now, centralization is still a problem even in decentralized systems.