Bluesky suffers strange outage after Elon Musk said Block feature will be deleted on X

Bluesky suffered an outage after Elon Musk said “Block is going to be deleted as a feature” on X (formerly Twitter). Some reports suggest this happened due to an influx of users coming from X.

Bluesky users noted slower load times on the platform. (Bloomberg)

Right after X (formerly known as Twitter) owner Elon Musk tweeted that the block feature will be deleted from the platform yesterday, it sparked outrage. Many came forward expressing their displeasure with the decision and urged Musk to reconsider his stance. Something else happened right about this time as well. X rival Bluesky suffered an outage and many users reported that the server load time was excessively high. Some reports are now suggesting that there might be a correlation between the two.

According to a report by TechCrunch Bluesky's outage started right after the tweet by Musk, which could have been caused by an influx of users leaving X. There is a precedence for this as well. Last time when Bluesky suffered an outage, X announced restrictions on viewing posts due to AI companies scrapping its data to train their foundational models.

Bluesky suffers an outage

Some users reported that posts and images were loading slowly, and they were witnessing occasional error messages. In addition to that, the website's status page also indicated that it suffered an issue that affected the performance of the platform, as per the TechCrunch report.

The report also mentioned, “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”. This definitely points to the fact that some of these incoming users could be X users dissatisfied with the recent announcement.

After 24 hours, Bluesky's status page indicated that the main issue was resolved, however, some users may face challenges in loading some images and posts for some time more.

Yesterday, Musk replied to a tweet that asked the question if there was ever a reason to block someone over muting them, when he said, “Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs”. He also added, “It makes no sense”. Interestingly, Musk has been a long-time critic of the blocking feature, as well as other basic features of social media platforms.