Bluesky April 2026 Outage Post-Mortem

threecheese

> What I had missed is that we deployed a new internal service last week that sent less than three GetPostRecord requests per second, but it did sometimes send batches of 15-20 thousand URIs at a time. Typically, we'd probably be doing between 1-50 post lookups per request. That’ll do it.

goekjclo

> The timing of these log spikes lined up with drops in user-facing traffic, which makes sense. Our data plane heavily uses memcached to keep load off our main Scylla database, and if we're exhausting ports, that's a huge problem. I expect this is common.

jmclnx

Lite Blue on a dark Blue background. That is a new one, I have seen grey text on lite grey, but blue on blue ? The article does work in lynx, at least I can read it.

rvz

Thank you for the post mortem on this outage.

jonstaab

nostr never goes down

electrondood

Great write up... curious about the RCA. Thanks!

tapoxi

I don't really understand this architecture, but I thought Bluesky was distributed like Mastodon? How can it have an outage?

gsibble

Did all 3 users notice?

mwkaufma

Tell us more about this buggy "new internal service" that's scraping batch data :P

drewg123

Golang's use of a potentially unbounded number of threads is just insane. I used to be fairly bullish on golang, but this, combined with the fact that its garbage collected, makes me feel its just unsuitable for production use.

pembrook

Distributed social media goes down? hrmmm. Email and the internet don't have "downtime." Certain key infra providers do of course. ISPs can go down. DNS providers can go down. But the internet and email itself can't go down absent a global electricity outage. You haven't built a decentralized network until you reach that standard imo. Otherwise its just "distributed protocol" cosplay. Nice costume. Kind of like how everybody has been amnesia'd into thinking Obsidian is open source when it really isn't.

opem

At least they aren't hiding and transparent about it unlike the big tech corps with so called SLAs

streetfighter64

> They represent real user-facing downtime Off-topic, but "real" feels like the new "delve". Is there such a thing as "fake" or "virtual" downtime, or why do people feel the need to specify that all manner of things are "real" nowadays?

mwagstaff

With my SRE hat on, dare I ask... could/should this have been picked up in testing? And then normally there's a nice discussion about how production is very different to the test environment.

heliumtera

Good to know the discussion about decentralization and federation had finally ended