As it adjusts to rising account numbers and posts, Bluesky also appears to be going through some growing pains on the tech side.
The text-based social media site, largely seen as an alternative to X/Twitter, has been moving more slowly over the past few hours. Specifically, Downdetecter logged a massive spike in reports of outages around 9 a.m. PT today, and it's been moving slowly for several of us here at IGN.
The team's acknowledged the issues, with dev Samuel Newman posting at 5:30 a.m. PT that "site is in read-only mode for a sec because something fell over." Fellow developer Paul Frazee updated at 9 a.m. PT that the site is recovered, but warned that "today will get interesting" in terms of outages. He also gave users a heads up that, during an outage, they can temporarily expect "invalid handle" errors, issues with "liking" posts, posts not showing up, and other "random errors or blank screens."
"We're so over / we're so back, but for our servers today," Frazee added.
Bluesky opened registrations to the general public this past February, but has seen a large jump in users particularly in the wake of the U.S. presidential election, as reported by The New York Times. The app's official account announced on Tuesday that 1 million people had joined Bluesky in the past week, and confirmed on Wednesday that it has passed the 15 million user mark.
That is, however, quite a ways behind the other popular X/Twitter alternative, Meta's Threads, which recently hit 275 million monthly users (via The Verge). Still, Bluesky is currently the #1 free app on the iOS store, followed by Threads at #2. X/Twitter is currently at the #25 spot, with NBC News reporting that the app has seen its largest exodus since Elon Musk's takeover.
As of press time, Bluesky's latest update on the server issues came at around 10:30 a.m. PT, with the app's official account posting, "if Bluesky is a lil slow for you, hang tight! There were some networking issues on the U.S. east coast affecting Bluesky and other apps, but looks like they're resolving now." We'll keep an eye on the situation and update here when it's fully resolved.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
