Bluesky, the social media platform preferred by X expatriates, faced a major interruption on Thursday, April 16. In a post on their official Bluesky profile, the app’s management revealed that the disruption was caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

“Our team became aware of sporadic app disruptions around 11:40pm PDT on April 15, 2026,” the statement indicated. “They labored throughout the night to mitigate a complex Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which escalated during the day.”

Fortunately, Bluesky confirmed that there was no sign of user data being compromised during the attack, which affected the app’s functionality, feeds, notifications, and search capabilities. The company assured that more details would be provided by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.

The Bluesky status page indicated that the app was fully operational at the time of this report, boasting a 99.983 percent uptime over the preceding 90 days.

A DDoS attack is relatively straightforward and low-effort for cybercriminals, involving a large volume of requests aimed at overwhelming servers. Such attacks have been around since the early era of the internet and continue to pose challenges, as illustrated by the Bluesky outage.

The outage impacted users early in the morning, with DownDetector noting thousands of reports of user errors. (Note: DownDetector and Mashable are owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis.)

Bluesky saw considerable growth following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and after President Donald Trump’s second election. Nevertheless, its expansion has recently stagnated, with data showing a decrease in daily active users.

Mashable reached out to Bluesky for comments regarding the attack and will update the article if a response is provided.