Bluesky outage raises questions over decentralisation promise

Bluesky, the decentralised social network that promised a break from traditional centralised platforms, faced a significant outage on Thursday evening, briefly halting access for users on both web and mobile platforms, TechCrunch reported.The platform remained inaccessible for nearly an hour. A message on Bluesky’s status page acknowledged the disruption, attributing it to what the company described as “Major PDS Networking Problems”. PDS stands for personal data servers, which form a core part of Bluesky’s infrastructure.

The report added that the first update about the issue was posted at 6:55 PM ET, followed by a second message at 7:38 PM ET, indicating that a fix was being implemented.

If decentralisation is meant to eliminate single points of failure, why did Bluesky go down? The answer lies in how the platform is currently structured and used.

Even though Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, which allows anyone to run parts of the network such as personal data servers, relays and client apps, most people still depend on Bluesky’s official servers and app. So, even though the system is decentralised in theory, most of the activity still runs through infrastructure controlled by Bluesky itself.

Users operating independent infrastructure were unaffected by the outage, reinforcing the potential of the model. Bluesky has said its long-term goal is to encourage the growth of multiple communities, each potentially running their own servers, moderation systems, and apps.

One example is Blacksky, an initiative building safer and more inclusive online spaces using the AT Protocol.The incident also reignited a familiar rivalry between Bluesky and Mastodon, another decentralised network that operates using the ActivityPub protocol.

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