6 ms·
Bluesky has been dealing with a DDoS attack for nearly a full day
- minimaxir 6mo agoThe 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."
- cryzinger 6mo agoA 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 6mo ago[flagged]
- daveguy 6mo agoWhy would anyone blindly criticize AI tools, when there are so many flaws to see?
- walletdrainer 6mo agoClearly there are a plenty of people incorrectly blaming AI for bluesky outages, why indeed?
- jdgoesmarching 6mo agoThis isn’t surprising at all. It reminds me of staunch Apple haters who recycle superficial talking points as opposed to Apple nerds who have long lists of very pointed critiques. What annoys me the most bsky AI hate is the assumption that people who spend a lot of time working with LLMs don’t understand their weaknesses, as if we aren’t constructing systems and evaluations to determine precisely how much AI sucks for our given task.
- lxgr 6mo agoBecause that would take a minimum amount of effort, nuance, and reasoning, and the result would probably generate less interactions compared to a cheap shot based on vibes.
- cryzinger 6mo agoI don't think they're idiots, or blindly criticizing; but I do think there's a kind of kneejerk reaction spurred by (legitimate, understandable) anti-AI sentiment, plus the fact that most people have absolutely no clue how cloud hosting, infrastructure, or software development in general works. The frustrating part to me is when people who don't know much about a topic try to make big, sweeping statements about it!
- swasheck 6mo agopeople really do struggle to differentiate between correlation and causation. we humans love our patterns so that we can make sense of existence.
- avaer 6mo agoMore like a struggle to STFU about things people don't know much about. I don't think the comments are thought out at all beyond being said in reaction, or likely to get a reaction.
- boring-human 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoPerhaps 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.
- lxgr 6mo agoMaybe I’m in a very atypical corner of Bluesky, but I can’t say I’ve seen more than average anti-AI sentiment. Also worth considering that there is a lot of anti-AI sentiment outside of our bubble! Maybe not a majority, but the minority is very vocal.
- sieabahlpark 6mo ago[dead]
- jasonvorhe 6mo agoWould 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.
- grishka 6mo agoTheoretically, 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 6mo agoDDoS saturates the network, not the service. Even a box doing nothing would still be unreachable.
- pixel_popping 6mo agoNot true, a well done DDoS targets also underlying services (example hitting most consuming DB writes).
- junon 6mo agoThere are multiple kinds of ddos attacks targeting different levels of infrastructure. Idk how anyone can say absolutely that a ddos works in one specific way.
- walletdrainer 6mo agoA well done DDoS gets the target depeered :)
- malshe 6mo agoI am not surprised. People on Bluesky are so blatantly anti-AI.
- SlinkyOnStairs 6mo 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?"
- _djo_ 6mo agoAs 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.
- _djo_ 6mo agoHave not*
- ascorbic 6mo agoI 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.
- yangm97 6mo agoNostr has the highest count of AI boosters per square meter I’ve ever seen, yet nobody seems to be DDoS’ing that.
- novemp 6mo agoYou have to care about something to DDOS it.
- paulddraper 6mo agoDo you have an example?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- anonymousab 6mo agoIt turns out that this was, in fact, the case. They DDOS'd themselves, with a deployment of their own code - something they have separately claimed is "99% AI written" these days.
- minimaxir 6mo agoSource? Bluesky has not published a RCA yet and they said the would on April 20: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3mjprnr5ptk2m https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3mjprnr5ptk2m There is apparently a blog post going around but I am blocked by the person who posted it. I would still wait for the RCA. (EDIT: this is the blog post, it's about an outage a week ago, and does not mention AI: https://pckt.blog/b/jcalabro/april-2026-outage-post-mortem-219ebg2 https://pckt.blog/b/jcalabro/april-2026-outage-post-mortem-2... )
- userbinator 6mo agoWhat 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 6mo agoIf 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 6mo agoOr they'll (the site operators using Cloudflare proxy) make ill considered firewall rules like "If not Chrome, require security check".
- sammy2255 6mo agoWhat's your point? You can configure this in Nginx too
- rezonant 6mo agoNginx has a built in recaptcha page based on rules? News to me. Even if it does, the point of Cloudflare's WAF is to avoid the traffic touching the origin if the security check doesn't succeed, so any nginx solution isn't really providing the same value.
- LoganDark 6mo agoAt 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 6mo ago
- weird_tentacles 6mo ago[dead]
- bit1993 6mo agoA decentralized protocol by definition should not be vulnerable to DDos attacks.
- minimaxir 6mo agoBluesky isn't ATProto.
- anon7000 6mo agoYou’re saying a mastodon instance can’t vet DDosed?
- eukara 6mo agoTruth 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?
- Charon77 6mo agoTrue. 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
- genewitch 6mo agoi get real tired of people trumpeting that bsky is distributed. Can i run a private node? can i run a functional node completely within my network segment? because i can with gnusocial and misskey; i've never run mastodon; i am on fosstodon and a couple of other mastodon-likes. bluesky is to discord what mastodon (fedi) is to IRC. don't let the fact that most people use the main instances fool you, there's thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of instances. I haven't seen a tally recently, i forget the account that shows them for each "instance type", like pleroma, misskey, mastodon, pixelfed, whatever the reddit clone is, whatever the 4chan clone is, and so on. anyhow when elon bought twitter mastodon surged. I hope they didn't spend millions upgrading the main instances because most of that dropped off because, you know, everyone's on twitter. only a few million on mastodon. My whole point is, trying to shoehorn words like "distributed" into a system that i cannot run independently is, well it's just not distributed, that's all. edit: maybe this is sour grapes because i never got an invite; but maybe i think it's just twitter with a different coat of paint and different buzzwords attached.
- decremental 6mo ago[dead]
- adrithmetiqa 6mo agoIs 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 6mo agoDepending 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 6mo agoOne possible purpose is marketing. Owners of the botnet are merely demoing the capabilities for prospective customers.
- 0xedd 6mo ago[dead]
- OuterVale 6mo agoThe 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 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'.
- aaron695 6mo ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoSource: https://bsky.social/about/blog/04-16-2026-bluesky-service-interruption https://bsky.social/about/blog/04-16-2026-bluesky-service-in...
- midtake 6mo ago[flagged]
- lpcvoid 6mo agoWe are taking about bluesky, not Twitter.
- mrweasel 6mo agoHopefully 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.
- esseph 6mo ago> It seems like we're don't really see that many deliberate DDoS attack anymore. There are more now then there ever have been in number of infected hosts and total data volume. The internet is a big place. ”On 13 April 2026, 21 countries joined forces in a coordinated action week that focused on enforcement and prevention measures against over 75 000 criminal users engaging in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire services. With over 75 000 warning emails and letters being sent to identified criminal users and 4 arrests, the action week also led to the takedown of 53 domains and the issuing of 25 search warrants.” Source: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/europol-supported-global-operation-targets-over-75-000-users-engaged-in-ddos-attacks https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/euro...
- tasuki 6mo agoI thought it was distributed/decentralised?
- shafyy 6mo agoThought so too. Odd.
- direwolf20 6mo agoBluesky 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 6mo agoI know, didn't add an /s. I thought it was obvious haha
- rimunroe 6mo agoThe Bluesky app view is centralized in that it can decide which content to show, but A) the hosting of that content is decentralized, and B) alternate app views like Blacksky exist which are fully independent of Bluesky (both Bluesky the company and Bluesky the app view). The Bluesky app view could stop showing users content from Blacksky (or any other) PDSes, but that's it. If you're using the Blacksky app view, afaik Bluesky the company can't do anything other than cut you off from Bluesky's PDSes.
- direwolf20 6mo agoIf by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally" They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised.
- rimunroe 6mo ago> If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally" Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. This doesn’t mean that the decentralized nature is just a marketing gimmick. It’s unsurprising that almost everyone uses the Bluesky app given that A) the infrastructure for hosting your own relay or app view (I can’t remember which) didn’t have a reference implementation until a while after launch, and B) the user base is much less tech-y than what I’ve seen on Mastodon. Most of the user base moved over in the flight from Twitter/X a couple years ago. I think if it had come out at a different time you’d see something which looked a lot more like Mastodon’s large population distribution. Also, while this doesn't really matter it looks like the number of users on non-Bluesky PDSes is 1.42% of the total, not 0.001%. > They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised. Could you explain what you mean by the underlying protocol having become centralized over time? While I can understand arguing about whether or not Bluesky-the-social-network is practically decentralized to the degree of something like Mastodon or that it became more centralized over time, I think arguing that ATproto[1] itself isn’t decentralized would be ludicrous. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239
- strimoza 6mo agoCurious 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.
- aaron695 6mo ago[dead]
- ddactic 6mo ago[dead]
- Capricorn2481 6mo agoIt seems like DDoS's are getting harder and harder to deal with. The tips that worked 10 years ago are now easily worked around. I keep seeing people on here say "just use TLS fingerprinting" like it's a panacea, but I can't remember the last time an attack didn't spoof their fingerprint. It feels like, outside of custom behavior tracking, there's no good way to truly protect your site without making it more restrictive in general. Require JS, client side challenges, cloudflare.
- ece 6mo agoClient side challenges would be fine when a DDoS is actually happening, but they're basically targeting certain platforms more than others right now. Not actually helping in keeping a site secure in that case and hurting user experience.