A Bluesky server issue froze some users’ feeds this morning

X alternative Bluesky suffered from network disruption this morning that left some users unable to see or share new posts for hours. I first noticed that my “Following” feed — which is supposed to load posts chronologically — wasn’t showing any posts more recent than two hours earlier. I follow 728 accounts right now, some of which are extremely online, so I knew something must be up. The feed is loading fine now, and never broke at all for some users.

While Bluesky’s own service page didn’t report any outage during the incident, it was later updated to acknowledge “network disruption” that caused some posts to be “delayed by several hours.” It now notes that “network services are recovering, and recent posts by all impacted users should appear soon,” while the official developer account for AT Protocol, the tech that underlies Bluesky, says that “all services should now be recovered!”

When I tried to share one of my own articles from this morning during the outage, it appeared to post successfully — I could even still see it on my Bluesky profile page, and received a notification about a reply from one Verge reader — but when I tried to click through to the post itself, it said it couldn’t be found. I can now see the post live on the network, though it displays a timestamp from well after I initially tried to post it.

One of my colleagues saw the same problems as me, while another saw an error message warning that “some kind of issue occurred when contacting the feed server.” Some Reddit users spotted problems too.

Then again, another colleague’s feed loaded just fine throughout, so the network issue wasn’t universal. We’ve reached out to Bluesky for comment.

Update, September 24th: Bluesky says it has recovered from the outage.