Yep, Bluesky Was Down (and Might Go Down Again)

It's not just you: Bluesky was down. For a brief period of time Thursday afternoon, the website and the mobile app returned a never-ending loading screen for logged-in users.

While it isn't ideal for a social media platform to fail to load, it's not the most surprising development if you've been following Bluesky's rise this week. Following the US election, X users fled to Bluesky in droves. The app, which has been a bit slow to build a user base over its three-year life, exploded seemingly overnight. It was the #1 free app on the iOS App Store (the whole store, mind you, not just social media apps), and surpassed 15 million users.

I only noticed the issue when trying to load the site around 12:30pm ET today. But once the site bounced back, I saw Bluesky developers discussing how the site was down intermittently. Samuel (no last name given), for example, shared that the site was in read-only mode momentarily this morning while they fixed something, while developer Paul Frazee shared that the site had "now recovered," and that if it goes down later, "grab a soda, pet the kitty. We'll hit it with a wrench as fast as we can."

Since writing this piece, the site has come back online, and crashed again. It's possible the platform will continue to crash and reload today, but it's impressive it's managed to stay so stable this whole time in the first place. If you're thinking about joining the social media site, don't be afraid to start looking for your X followers there, or upload all your old tweets to your new Bluesky account.

If you do leave X, I recommend you don't delete your account, however. Instead, move on to something better, and remember what a good social media platform is supposed to be like.