Bluesky buckled following Twitter/X’s announcement about the end of blocks

Twitter, er X, competitor Bluesky buckled following Elon Musk’s announcement that X will no longer support the “block” function in favor of mutes only. Users on Bluesky were seeing issues with slow load times and the occasional error message when trying to load posts. Images and graphics were also slow to load. In addition, the site’s status page indicated an issue affecting performance was being investigated.

The company has often had to deal with the influx of users when Twitter announces a particularly unwelcome change, and that could be the case here — though members of the Bluesky team have not yet confirmed what’s causing the issues at hand or whether the timing is coincidental.

However, data from a source that leverages the Bluesky API to track new user registrations indicates that the decentralized social media platform has seen 5,616 new registrations in the past 24 hours, compared with 536 in the 24 hours preceding this. So it could be that more people suddenly cashed in their invite codes.

The Bluesky status page, meanwhile, published a message that it’s seeing degraded PDS performance, and noted, “We are currently investigating this issue.”

That’s not very helpful information, but the AT Protocol docs (the protocol behind Bluesky’s app) describe PDS as a “Personal Data Server” or “PDS,” which “acts as an account’s trusted agent in the network, routes client network requests, and hosts repositories.”

Techmeme CEO Gabe Rivera also noted that his news sites had to stop posting to Bluesky as they were timing out when trying to use Bluesky’s APIs.

Bluesky’s issues seem to be slowly resolving, we’ve found over the past several minutes. As we updated the status page, a new note appeared. Bluesky now indicates it has “fixed the main problem,” but added that “some images may not be loading” and said a fix is in progress.

Meanwhile, over on X, both Bluesky and Threads are trending terms suggesting another Twitter/X exodus could soon be underway as users react to the startling news.

Though there’s not a reliable way to track Bluesky’s performance outside of the status page, Twitter has often been the source of referrals to the rival network. According to data from Similarweb, a few months ago 86% of social referrals to the Bluesky app’s website (bsky.app) were coming from twitter.com. Over the past 28 days, that figure dropped to 78.8%. Total daily traffic also dropped from a peak in mid-July, the firm said.

Recently, X slowed down referral traffic to various websites including its competition, like Threads and Bluesky.