Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day

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ddotmanish about 10 hours ago 59 commentsRead Article on theverge.com

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Discussion (59 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

minimaxir•about 9 hours ago

The prevalent discourse/attempt-at-a-meme-but-people-are-taking-it-seriously saying "Bluesky is down because of AI vibecoding!" is starting to get annoying and unoriginal.

Even when Bluesky confirmed it's a DDoS, the line is now "maybe they wouldn't have gotten DDoSed if they didn't vibecode and their code was better."

SlinkyOnStairs•about 3 hours ago

> Even when Bluesky confirmed it's a DDoS, the line is now "maybe they wouldn't have gotten DDoSed if they didn't vibecode and their code was better."

The context of the "jokes", regardless of if one finds them funny, is that this is exactly how AI boosters (including the bluesky team) have been behaving.

Every little benefit, no matter how small or unfounded, was being attributed to AI usage. So people do the opposite, attributing every little problem to the use of AI.

The implied punchline being "Oh, so now you care about accuracy?"

yangm97•28 minutes ago

Nostr has the highest count of AI boosters per square meter I’ve ever seen, yet nobody seems to be DDoS’ing that.

ascorbic•about 2 hours ago

I haven't seen them do this at all. They've said that they use AI tools when writing code, because most devs do, and they've previewed Attie, their codegen for custom feeds thing, which is a separate tool. None of that is attributing improvements in Bluesky to AI.

_djo_•about 3 hours ago

As I understand things, the only AI tool the Bluesky team has been pushing has been a feed generator/curator. They have been pushing for vibe coding their systems or for using AI to generate content on Bluesky.

cryzinger•about 8 hours ago

A week or two ago, when there was a Bluesky outage and a Claude outage at the same time, people were earnestly pointing to that as evidence that Claude was somehow a load-bearing component of Bluesky, or that AI vibecoding had caused the outage... I had to just disengage but I was also very annoyed by it all.

walletdrainer•about 4 hours ago

The people blindly criticising AI tools are idiots? Shocking! Who would have thought.

daveguy•about 2 hours ago

Why would anyone blindly criticize AI tools, when there are so many flaws to see?

boring-human•about 6 hours ago

I don't have any anecdotal data, just detecting a whiff of a possible pattern in your statement. DDoS is bots. Any chance the prevalent discourse is bots? "I ain't saying she a gold digger..."

pjc50•about 6 hours ago

Perhaps underestimating how much the bsky audience absolutely hate AI.

It's funny how closely bsky has replicated the dynamic of old Twitter where the people who run it and the people who use it have completely different priorities and loathe each other.

grishka•about 5 hours ago

Theoretically, if the backend code is optimized enough, a DDoS attempt wouldn't lead to a denial of service since all those requests would just get served as normal. And as long as the network isn't the bottleneck, which it probably is in most cases.

Manfred•about 3 hours ago

DDoS saturates the network, not the service. Even a box doing nothing would still be unreachable.

pixel_popping•about 3 hours ago

Not true, a well done DDoS targets also underlying services (example hitting most consuming DB writes).

jasonvorhe•about 4 hours ago

Would be funny if this nonsense came mostly from bots to distract from the fact that Bluesky isn't decentralized and thus easier to take out.

malshe•about 4 hours ago

I am not surprised. People on Bluesky are so blatantly anti-AI.

OuterVale•about 8 hours ago

The interface seemed to function as normal, but specifically the API was targeted, which left a lot of confused users who were seeing the interface peppered with errors. Watching as it unfolded, it seems it affected certain regions to begin with and then slowly spread worldwide.

Seems they might have failed to host the status page (https://status.bsky.app) separately as well, because that went down several times throughout the outage. They also weren't very active in updating the status page, and the notice that was there had a typo of 'reginos' and a description of 'null'.

reddalo•about 4 hours ago

The status page seems hosted by UptimeRobot, so it looks like it was a problem on their end.

userbinator•about 9 hours ago

What are the chances some company offers to "save" them with a security service which coincidentally will also require users to use the latest officially-sanctioned browsers, OSes, and "trusted" hardware to pass the "security check"...

sammy2255•about 9 hours ago

If you're referring to Cloudflare, the "security check" is not a default setting. For some reason administrators love to use Under attack mode as a band-aid measure to reduce load on the host.

rezonant•about 6 hours ago

Or they'll (the site operators using Cloudflare proxy) make ill considered firewall rules like "If not Chrome, require security check".

sammy2255•about 2 hours ago

What's your point? You can configure this in Nginx too

LoganDark•about 8 hours ago

At least Apple devices are actually secure and can't really be omitted from things other than gaming and business. Granted, gaming and business are pretty important.

hsbauauvhabzb•about 7 hours ago

You mean except for that 0day exploit kit floating around on github last week right?

fastily•about 7 hours ago

Would you happen to have a link to this? For science of course :)

throwaway290•about 4 hours ago

You mean the one for old ios versions?

fragmede•about 7 hours ago

> At least Apple devices are actually secure

lol

strimoza•about 3 hours ago

Curious how they handled it at the CDN level. I use Bunny CDN for video streaming on my project and signed URLs help a lot for abuse prevention, but a full DDoS is a different beast entirely.

tasuki•about 6 hours ago

I thought it was distributed/decentralised?

amelius•about 4 hours ago

Yes, that's the first "D" in "DDoS" ;)

lizardking•about 2 hours ago

You're probably thinking of Mastadon

shafyy•about 5 hours ago

Thought so too. Odd.

direwolf20•about 3 hours ago

Bluesky has never been distributed/decentralised. It's a single central system, which fetches 0.001% of user data from external systems if the user opts in, and has a marketing team that calls this decentralisation.

shafyy•about 3 hours ago

I know, didn't add an /s. I thought it was obvious haha

ChrisArchitect•about 8 hours ago

Source: https://bsky.social/about/blog/04-16-2026-bluesky-service-in...

adrithmetiqa•about 8 hours ago

Is this just for fun or is there some underlying purpose to those type of attack?

Is it possible to have any certainty when answering that question?

tsimionescu•about 5 hours ago

Depending on size, such attacks can be very costly to organize, at least in opportunity cost (that is, using a botnet to attack BlueSky doesn't cost anything per se, but it does mean you can't use it for some other purpose, such as attacking someone else or mining Bitcoin).

If you're asking in general, DDoS attacks can absolutely serve a purpose - either to punish an organization that the attackers are unhappy with, or to hide some other more targeted attacks in a flood of errors, weird behaviors, and tired sysadmins.

pferde•about 3 hours ago

One possible purpose is marketing. Owners of the botnet are merely demoing the capabilities for prospective customers.

mrweasel•about 6 hours ago

Hopefully there will be some post-mortem. It seems like we're don't really see that many deliberate DDoS attack anymore. Not that it doesn't happen, but they really don't provide that much value against a target like Bluesky (unless you really hate them).

I'd be interested in how the attack manifests. Is it an actual DDoS? Is it highly aggressive scraping? We should be able to see this in how the attack manifests itself. What is the sources? That's a little harder, but it would be interesting to know if it's compromised devices, residential proxies, rented cloud capacity or something else.

bit1993•about 9 hours ago

A decentralized protocol by definition should not be vulnerable to DDos attacks.

minimaxir•about 9 hours ago

Bluesky isn't ATProto.

bit1993•about 8 hours ago

Thank you for the clarification.

shafyy•about 5 hours ago

For all practical purposes, it is.

mr_mitm•about 1 hour ago

It's federated, not decentralized

anon7000•about 8 hours ago

You’re saying a mastodon instance can’t vet DDosed?

eukara•about 8 hours ago

Truth is if mastodon.social gets ddosd the same as Bluesky I can still use the rest of the network fine. Proof is in the pudding. tons of instances that make up the fabric of redundancy. I think most people would be served better if Bluesky acted differently early with their rollout in a sharded manner?

yangm97•17 minutes ago

This is half true. If mastodon.social goes down every single one of the accounts made on that instance go down as well. In truly decentralized protocols you own your identity and can take it elsewhere, for instance, in Nostr and SSB, a relay/pub going down is no big deal since you can connect to other servers and maintain communications.

Charon77•about 8 hours ago

True. The only 'distributed' part of bluesky is in the PR. Otherwise there'd be more instances.

My mastodon account is not even on mastodon.social, because why would I, when I could have a home server closer to home

throwaway290•about 2 hours ago

Blacksky and other instances of bluesky are not affected, what are you talking about?

snailmailman•about 8 hours ago

The people I follow on mastodon come from a wide variety of instances. While mastodon.social is the largest instance, most of the accounts I follow are elsewhere.

Granted, all the smaller instances are likely easier to DOS as they are small instances. But mastodon is actually decentralized. If any one instance goes down, everything else keeps working. Unlike Bluesky and ATProto which is more of a theoretical “could be” decentralized.

direwolf20•about 3 hours ago

On the Fediverse you can even block mastodon.social and still have a well populated feed. This is not the case for bluesky.