It turns out that decentralized social networks can go down, too.
On Thursday evening, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to load the app on both the web and mobile devices for roughly an hour. According to a message on Bluesky’s status page, the company was aware of the outage, which it attributed to “Major PDS Networking Problems.” (PDS means personal data servers.)
….Despite the platform’s decentralized nature, the majority of Bluesky users today interact with the service via Bluesky’s official app, powered by the AT Protocol. While in theory, anyone can run the various parts of the infrastructure that make up the protocol, including PDS, relays, and other components, it’s still early days for the social network, so few have done so.
MORE HERE:
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/wait-how-did-a-decentralized-service-like-bluesky-go-down/
The graph on DownDetector last night was striking, about 7 PM Eastern instead of a typical 1-2 trouble reports, it showed over 10,000 reports.