Bluesky—the Twitter/X competitor that’s gained over a million new users since the US election—faced an outage yesterday, impacting some in the Eastern time zone.
The app wrote on X that some in the Eastern US may not be able to access the app due to “networking issues” on Thursday. At least one of us at PCMag encountered the issue, as the iOS Bluesky app wasn’t loading for us yesterday between the late afternoon and early evening from Atlanta, Georgia.
Downdetector.com paints a similar picture, logging over 12,000 user reports yesterday between the hours of 1pm and 6pm ET. 67% of reports were about the Bluesky app, while 31% of reports had issues with the website.
The outage is because Cogent Communications, a Bluesky internet provider, cut a fiber cable, causing a “loss of network connectivity,” The Verge reports, citing Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu. Liu said the outage only occurred for 15 to 30 minutes, despite the five-hour window of reports noted above.
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Bluesky develper Paul Frazee confirmed the issue in a Bluesky post Thursday night, writing: “The outages aren’t us. One of our bandwidth providers apparently got their fiber cable cut and has been on/off all day.”
Some Bluesky users took to X to complain about the outage, while others posted about it on Bluesky once they had regained access.
“Can you believe this whole site runs on a Mac Mini M4,” Frazee wrote early Friday morning.
The Nov. 14 outage occurred on Bluesky’s “highest traffic day ever,” according to a Bluesky team member, who reassured users that the outage had nothing to do with the platform’s traffic spike.
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Bluesky has made significant user gains globally in the past month, adding over 1.6 million iOS users in the past month and nearly 1.7 million Android users, according to AppFigures data. US users signed up the most, making up 45% of signups on iOS and 43% of signups on Android.
While X still saw more downloads in the past month than Bluesky, Meta’s Threads has both of them beat. Threads got over 19 million Android downloads and over 11.1 million iOS downloads globally in the past month, while X saw 5.8 million on Android and 2.69 million on iOS.
Editor’s Note: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.
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