Outage hits Bluesky just as the platform's popularity takes off

Bluesky has been a top seller in the app store

The social media platform Bluesky was hit by an outage on Thursday, amid a rising wave of popularity for the app, which is often described as a friendlier alternative to X.

Bluesky has at times been the most downloaded app on both the US and UK Apple Stores in recent days, with many social media users leaving X, formerly Twitter, in the wake of the US election.

But on Thursday, some users around the world had trouble getting their feeds and notifications to load.

Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu told the BBC that one of its internet providers “had some downtime, apparently because a fibre cable was out. That means it happened outside of our company".

Bluesky provided a status notice from Cogent Communications that said some customers using part of its network located between Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, had temporarily lost connectivity.

Not all users experienced the outage, which appeared to be largely resolved late Thursday, according to the company.

In the week since Donald Trump won the US presidential election, 2.25 million users have signed up for Bluesky, which was started by Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter's cofounders.

The platform said on Thursday evening that an additional one million people had joined within 24 hours.

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky was originally thought up by the founder and former chief executive of Twitter, Jack Dorsey.

The key difference between Bluesky and most other social media platforms is that it is decentralised, meaning it is operated on independent servers and not those owned by the company.

It describes itself as "social media as it should be" - a place where people can come together over shared interests "and have some fun again".

Users can post text, images and video, reply to other users publicly or have one-to-one conversations in direct messages - though these are not yet protected by the most secure and private method, end-to-end encryption.

Mr Dorsey has said previously he intended for Bluesky to be a decentralised version or extension of Twitter that no single person or entity owns.

Despite helping fund and start it, he is no longer part of the team behind the social network.

It is now run and predominantly owned by chief executive Jay Graber as a US public benefit corporation.

Its userbase - while growing - remains relatively small.

The platform hit 16m total users on Thursday.

Why are people joining it?

Many new users have said their decision to join Bluesky was driven by Elon Musk, who heavily backed Trump's election campaign and intends to remain involved in the new administration.

Threads, Meta's competitor to X, has also continued to expand.

“People are both disgusted and afraid of Elon Musk and what Twitter has become,” said Cory Johnson, Chief Market Strategist at Epistrophy Capital Research.

“Users are fleeing X, and Bluesky and Threads are the beneficiaries.”

It is not the first time that apps trying to rival X with a similar format for text posts have had a flurry of new sign-ups.

A decentralised network called Mastodon added hundreds of thousands of users after it popped up in the wake of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover.

Bluesky and Threads both had a spike in users in 2023 as Mr Musk began to implement changes to the platform.

This week, the British news outlet the Guardian announced it will no longer post on X, saying the US election underlined its concerns that Musk had been able to use X to “shape political discourse".

As Thursday's outage unfolded, Bluesky staff tried to make light of the situation, with one developer joking: “Btw — Today will get interesting! If the site goes down, maybe grab a soda, pet the kitty. We’ll hit it with a wrench as fast as we can.”

Additional reporting by Liv McMahon