Bluesky has been acting up today

Bluesky is growing quickly in popularity, but earlier today, an outage meant that my feeds and notifications were very slow to load on the web and mobile while logged in. That was similarly the case for a few of my Verge colleagues.

The outage, which didn’t affect all users, was apparently because one of Bluesky’s internet providers, Cogent Communications, had some downtime because a fiber cable was cut, spokesperson Emily Liu told The Verge. A Cogent status page did say that “some customers transiting our Raleigh/Durham <> Richmond, VA backbone network may be experiencing loss of network connectivity” and that a vendor is onsite to “resolve a fiber cut.” Liu said the Bluesky outage seemed to last for around 15 to 30 minutes and that the company’s infrastructure is “looking good.”

Bluesky developers had warned earlier that things might not work as expected today, though it appears any of these expected issues were separate from the fiber cut. Earlier this morning, developer Samuel Newman shared that the site would be briefly going into read-only mode because “something fell over.” After the site recovered, another developer, Paul Frazee, posted that “today will get interesting” and suggested that if the site goes down to “maybe grab a soda, pet the kitty.” When there’s an outage, Frazee says you might see things like an “Invalid Handle” message, likes not seeming to work, or “random errors or blank screens.”

Thursday afternoon, the site experienced a second big outage. After that outage, Bluesky developer Daniel Holmgren said that the site’s issues have “nothing to do with our code” but instead happened because of the cut fiber cable, “networking issues from our bare metal provider,” and Cloudflare DNS issues. Holmgren also said that they were happening “on our highest traffic day ever.”

Bluesky crossed the 15 million user mark yesterday, and the Bluesky app is currently the top free app in the App Store. Threads, however, is still much larger, having more than 15 million signups already this month.

Updates, November 14th: Added context from Bluesky and that there was another outage.