Bluesky Says DDoS Attack Caused Recent Day-Long Outage

Bluesky says a distributed denial-of-service attack was responsible for a recent disruption that affected the social network for about a day, flooding its systems with large volumes of unwanted traffic.

The company confirmed the attack on Monday, saying it had occurred over the previous 24 hours. Bluesky said it had upgraded its defences in response and was continuing to monitor the situation, but did not provide any additional technical details about the incident.

Bluesky upgrades defences after DDoS attack

A DDoS attack attempts to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming its infrastructure with traffic. Such attacks can use networks of compromised internet-connected devices to generate enough requests to consume server or network resources and disrupt access for legitimate users.

Security researchers discussing the incident on the IFIN public forum reported that Iran-backed attackers had claimed responsibility. The source material does not establish independent confirmation that the group making the claim carried out the attack, and Bluesky did not publicly identify an attacker in its statement.

The incident comes amid increased cyber activity attributed to Iran-backed groups targeting U.S. businesses and critical infrastructure following the start of the U.S. and Israel-led war earlier this year.

Bluesky faced another major disruption in April

This is not the first large-scale DDoS incident to disrupt Bluesky in recent months. The social network experienced a prolonged series of outages in April, also attributed to a surge in web traffic.

There is currently no confirmed link between the April incident and the latest attack. Bluesky’s public response to the latest disruption has focused on strengthening its defences and monitoring the service for further issues.