Bluesky, the social media platform currently experiencing a mass registration of new users, was hit by an outage on Thursday night. Users from across the globe had trouble loading their feeds and notifications. While the outage was global, it was not a total outage, some users could still access their feeds normally during the disruptions.
The internet observatory organization, Netblocks, reported the outage posting on X,” Note: Social media platform Bluesky is currently experiencing outages amidst an influx of users dissatisfied by X (formerly Twitter); incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering,”
In a statement to press, Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu, claimed that one of its internet providers “had some downtime, apparently because a fibre cable was out. She added “That means it happened outside of our company“.
The Great Migration
The rising wave of popularity for the app, comes in the wake of the recent US election. It is seen by some as alternative to X. Bluesky has recently topped the download charts on both the US and UK Apple Stores, as many social media users migrate from the app formerly known as Twitter.
In the week following Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, 2.25 million users joined Bluesky. A large number of new users have cited Elon Musk as a key reason for joining Bluesky, given his strong support for Trump’s election campaign and plans to stay engaged with the upcoming administration.
Meanwhile, Threads, Meta’s alternative to X, has also seen steady growth. However, some users have chosen to avoid Threads all together in an attempt to limit reliance on “Big Tech” firms.
READ: Meta’s Threads to Begin Ad Rollout in Early 2025
What sets Bluesky apart from most other social media platforms is its decentralized nature, meaning it runs on independent servers rather than those controlled by the company.
