- Bluesky faced outages Thursday as it gains millions of new users this week.
- Many people have said they’re leaving Elon Musk’s X in favor of Bluesky.
- Bluesky’s growth follows Musk’s role in Trump’s election win and X’s new terms of service.
Bluesky users are reporting outages as millions of new people sign up for the social networking site.
A Bluesky spokesperson told Business Insider in an email that the outage was due to one of the platform’s internet providers experiencing downtime “because a fiber cable was cut.”
“This means it happened outside of our company,” the spokesperson said. “It seemed to last ~15-30 minutes for some users, and not all users were affected.”
Bluesky has rocketed to the top spot in its category on the App Store this week as public figures like Don Lemon and media outlets announce that they’re leaving Elon Musk’s X after the US election and ahead of a terms of service change that’s expected to go into effect Friday.
“Follow me on Bluesky” was Lemon’s last post after announcing Wednesday that he’d be leaving the platform.
The Bluesky spokesperson said 2.5 million users had now joined the platform in the past week and that its team is “prepared to meet this demand.”
Bluesky hit the 15 million user mark on Wednesday and had already passed 16 million as of Thursday afternoon, according to a live stat-tracker by Jaz, whose Bluesky profile says they work at the company. Bluesky’s user numbers are still small compared to X.
On Thursday, thousands of people reported problems with the app and website on Downdetector.
Bluesky developers Paul Frazee — the CTO — and Samuel Newman kept users updated on the site’s status as issue reports came in. Frazee initially said the site had recovered but said an hour later that another outage had occurred.
“Today will get interesting! If the site goes down, maybe grab a soda, pet the kitty. We’ll hit it with a wrench as fast as we can,” he said in a post.
Frazee said outages often include errors with user handles, post likes, and publishing a post. Bluesky didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Bluesky first became widely known when Musk bought Twitter, now X, in 2022. Signups have grown after Donald Trump, heavily backed by X owner Musk, won the US presidential election. They’ve continued to flow as X prepares to put new terms of service in effect Friday.
With the change, X users must agree to handle all lawsuits against the site in a federal court district in northern Texas — outside the district where X is headquartered. The choice might have been intentional to ensure cases are heard in a court that would carry out an advantageous ruling for X, law experts told the Washington Post on Sunday.
Still, Bluesky’s 16 million users are dwarfed by the 250 million people that X said in March used its site daily. Threads, a similar short-form social media app owned by Meta, now has nearly 275 million monthly users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October.
Update: November 14, 2024 — This story been updated to include the reason for the outage.
