Bluesky, a Twitter competitor, fell after Elon Musk said that X will only support mutes instead of “block” functions. Bluesky users experienced sluggish post loading and occasional error messages. Graphics and images loaded slowly. Additionally, the site’s status page reported a performance issue being examined.
The Bluesky team has not yet confirmed what’s causing the troubles or whether the timing is coincidental, but Twitter’s unwanted changes have often caused a surge in users.
Using the Bluesky API to track new user registrations, the decentralised social media platform has seen 5,616 new registrations in the past 24 hours, up from 536 the day before. People may have cashed in their invite codes more suddenly.
The Bluesky status website reported poor PDS performance and said, “We are currently investigating this issue.”
That’s hardly helpful, but Bluesky’s app’s AT Protocol specifications describe PDS as a “Personal Data Server” or “PDS,” which “acts as an account’s trusted agent in the network, routes client network requests, and hosts repositories.”
Techmeme CEO Gabe Rivera also said his news sites had to stop uploading to Bluesky because their APIs timed out.
Over the past few minutes, Bluesky’s difficulties have been steadily resolving. A new note emerged after updating the status page. Bluesky says it has “fixed the main problem,” but “some images may not be loading” and a patch is in progress.
Bluesky and Threads are trending on X, signalling another Twitter/X exodus as users respond to the shocking news.
Though it’s hard to track Bluesky’s performance outside of the status page, Twitter often refers users to the competing network. Similarweb reported that 86% of social referrals to bsky.app came from twitter.com a few months ago. Over 28 days, it plummeted to 78.8%. The firm saw a decline in daily visits from mid-July.
X recently slowed referral traffic to Threads and Bluesky, its competitors.
