The issues, which appeared to only affect some users, have now been resolved.
Bluesky, the decentralised social media platform that posits itself as an alternative to Elon Musk’s X, has suffered an outage just as its user base has skyrocketed.
Yesterday (14 November), some users reported issues getting the site to load. A Bluesky spokesperson told the BBC that one of its internet service providers “had some downtime, apparently because a fibre cable was out. That means it happened outside of our company.”
Earlier this week, Bluesky surged past 15m users in the aftermath of Trump’s US election win. And yesterday it announced it had 1m sign-ups in the last day.
A Bluesky developer, in a post on the platform, explained that site problems also arose from networking issues from their bare metal provider as well as Cloudflare DNS issues.
The issues, which appeared to only affect some users, have now been resolved.
Enjoying an explosion in popularity, Bluesky is ranked among the top three apps in the US and Ireland on both the Apple and Google Play App stores.
Since being bought by Elon Musk, X – formally known as Twitter – severed all ties to Bluesky, a former Twitter-funded project, which has seen several incidents of surges in its user base in relation to controversies around X – which include incidents of misleading content and disinformation spreading across Musk’s platform.
Recently, Bluesky claimed a massive wave of followers during the same weekend that X got banned in Brazil.
The platform was announced in 2019 and aimed to create an “open and decentralised standard for social media”. The app shares similarities with Twitter – before it became X – in terms of design and function.
Beginning as an invite-only app, Bluesky had more than 3m sign-ups before it went public earlier this year.
The exodus from X has seemingly boosted other platforms too. According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, the microblogging platform Threads has seen more than 15m sign-ups in just November.
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