On Thursday evening, decentralized social networking service Bluesky experienced a major outage, rendering its platform inaccessible on web browsers and mobile clients for approximately an hour. According to an update posted to the company’s status page, the issue was attributed to “major PDS networking problems,” a reference to the service’s personal data servers (PDS).
Bluesky first acknowledged the outage publicly at 6:55 PM Eastern Time, following up shortly after at 7:38 PM with news that a fix had been initiated.
The outage raised questions and prompted some skepticism regarding the nature of decentralization itself—after all, isn’t decentralization specifically meant to eliminate such a single point of failure? In principle, yes. However, the reality of Bluesky’s service today illustrates some early-stage complexities: despite being designed around the open and decentralized AT Protocol, most users currently access the app through official infrastructure operated by Bluesky itself.
Crucially, the outage only impacted users relying on infrastructure directly supported by Bluesky. Independent instances operated by other individuals or organizations, though currently few in number, remained unaffected throughout the disruption. In the long-term vision for Bluesky and the AT Protocol, independent communities and operators managing their own infrastructure will likely mitigate similar incidents. Notably, Blacksky—a project aimed at building safer and more welcoming decentralized community platforms—is an early example already inhabiting this decentralized potential.
Nonetheless, for the immediate future, Bluesky’s centralized reliance meant the disruption was broadly felt by users. Unsurprisingly, the downtime provided fodder for rival platform users, notably Mastodon, another decentralized social network operating on a different software protocol known as ActivityPub. Mastodon enthusiasts seized the occasion to take humorous digs at Bluesky, highlighting its current infrastructure weaknesses by comparison. One Mastodon user sarcastically remarked on how his simple Raspberry Pi-powered Mastodon server was unaffected, while another quipped about Bluesky’s purported decentralization in jesting disbelief.
Despite this brief hiccup, Bluesky restored full service within roughly an hour. The incident, temporary though it was, provided an illustrative moment about the challenges and growing pains associated with creating genuinely decentralized systems that live up to their lofty promises.
