Bluesky Outage Highlights Challenges of Early Decentralized Infrastructure

On April 24, 2025, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a widespread outage that lasted approximately an hour, leaving users unable to access the app on both mobile and web platforms. The issue, which was attributed to ‘Major PDS Networking Problems’ according to Bluesky’s status page, began around 6:55 PM ET and began resolving by 7:38 PM ET. PDS stands for Personal Data Servers, a crucial part of the AT Protocol infrastructure that powers Bluesky.

Despite being decentralized in theory, the majority of users rely on Bluesky’s official app and infrastructure, making the platform susceptible to centralized disruptions. Only a few communities currently operate their own servers or clients, meaning that most users were affected. Users who had set up their own components were not impacted, underscoring the resilience of a truly decentralized model.

The incident reignited comparisons with other decentralized platforms, especially Mastodon, which uses a different protocol (ActivityPub) and is more commonly hosted independently by users. Mastodon users used the outage to poke fun at Bluesky’s perceived centralization.

The outage has brought attention to the practical challenges of building a decentralized system at scale, and the importance of distributing infrastructure to prevent similar disruptions in the future.