Bluesky Outage Highlights Centralised Gaps in Decentralised Vision

Bluesky, the social platform built on decentralised ideals, faced an unexpected hurdle this week when a core infrastructure issue caused a major service disruption. For nearly an hour, users across web and mobile were locked out of their accounts, sparking debate over the platform’s technical resilience.

The outage, which began at 6:55 p.m. ET, was blamed on a significant networking issue within Bluesky’s Personal Data Server (PDS) system. By 7:38 p.m., engineers were actively rolling out a fix, and full service was restored shortly after.

Although Bluesky champions a decentralised structure through its AT Protocol, most users still depend on infrastructure maintained by the platform itself. As a result, centralized bottlenecks—like this one—can still cause widespread outages.

Interestingly, users who run their own nodes or components of the AT Protocol were reportedly unaffected. This distinction highlights how Bluesky's decentralisation model is still in its infancy, with the majority of users yet to migrate to independent setups.

In theory, Bluesky aims to support a robust network of individually operated communities with autonomous moderation, infrastructure, and client apps. But for now, outages on Bluesky's main servers still impact a large portion of its community.

The incident reignited competition with Mastodon, another decentralised social network using the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon users were quick to mock Bluesky’s stumble, with one noting that their home server “just keeps chugging along.”

Despite the hiccup, Bluesky reaffirmed its commitment to building a more distributed and reliable system over time. As the platform continues to evolve, episodes like this may become important lessons in the growing pains of decentralisation.

Whether you're using Bluesky or X, maintaining control over your public content is always smart. Tools like TweetDeleter help users manage and clean up old posts, especially after technical mishaps or platform changes.