Bluesky Was Temporarily Unavailable for Millions of Users — Here's What Happened

When Elon Musk acquired X (formerly Twitter), those who don't support Donald Trump's right-hand man flocked elsewhere for a similar social media platform. Some found a new home with Bluesky, which originally started out as a project as what was once known as Twitter, but became its own entity in 2021. So when Bluesky went down on April 29, 2025, there was a bit of panic.

But why was Bluesky down, and does it have anything to do with Musk, Trump, or X? When users' feeds became unresponsive and the app was unusable for a period of time, many users were quick to fear the worst. They shared elsewhere online that they were concerned Bluesky was disabled indefinitely. So, what actually happened, and why was Bluesky down?

In the early hours of the morning on April 29, 2025, users began reporting outages on Bluesky. According to Downdetector, outages were reported from around 6 a.m. EST until shortly after 8 a.m. EST The outages began tapering off and seemed to stop completely around 9 a.m. EST. Even though the website and app were back up and running at that time, it still didn't answer the question of what happened.

Although Bluesky has not released a statement about why the app and the website were down, it's possible that there was an overload on the servers in some way, especially because this isn't the first time users have reported that Bluesky is down. It's also not uncommon for social media apps or websites to experience technical difficulties that have more tech-related issues than anything more controversial.

On April 24, 2025, Bluesky went down and later shared an explanation in a Bluesky post.

"We're back from a bit of downtime — thanks for your patience just now!" The official account shared in a post. "Our team is working to investigate the root cause. We share downtime updates at status.bsky.app."

When users reported the April 29 outages on Downdetector, they used the comment section for their outlet of what they likely would have said about the outage, had they been able to post on Bluesky at the time.

One user commented, "Bluesky down. Look for orange fingerprints," as a cheeky response to why Bluesky was down.

Another wrote, "Downdetector being the new Bluesky comment section."

In the event of another worldwide outage on Bluesky, the best course of action is to simply wait it out. Or, in some users' cases, comment about it with other users on Downdetector. But if it doesn't work for you in other instances, you can hard refresh your web browser or empty your cache, per the Bluesky help page.

You can also clear your browser data or make sure there isn't a firewall in place, blocking the website. The page also recommends contacting tech support if everything else fails. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix for a widespread outage on Bluesky.