Bluesky outage – Bluesky users reported widespread downtime on May 18, 2026, with over 5,000 outage reports as errors rose across its PDS instances. Bluesky said it was investigating. By May 18 at 9:06 PM ET, the service appeared back online and was being monitored.
For a lot of people, it didn’t start with a dramatic message—it started with a blank feed. On May 18, 2026, Bluesky’s website and app were showing widespread problems, and users quickly made it clear they weren’t the only ones stuck.
Thousands of people flocked to Downdetector to report an outage. The reports began around 6:00 PM ET, then kept climbing. At the time of writing, there were over 5,000 reports claiming that both the website and the app were down.
Bluesky acknowledged the issue on its status page. The platform said it was dealing with “elevated error rates across PDS instances,” and that it was investigating the problem. The expectation was that the platform wouldn’t stay offline for long.
The sequence was simple: user reports surged shortly after 6:00 PM ET, and Bluesky’s status page pointed to elevated errors across PDS instances rather than something isolated to a single device or account.
Update: By May 18, 2026 (9:06 PM ET), Bluesky appears to be back online. The status page says service has been restored and is now being monitored.
Bluesky outage Downdetector PDS instances social media downtime status page error rates
Blank feed is back again? Great.
I swear my account was hacked because the feed was just empty. Then I saw everyone on Downdetector like “yup down” lol. So it wasn’t just me I guess.
“PDS instances” sounds like some tech word for like… servers being dumb? I don’t get why it happens right when my friends start posting. Also the status page taking forever made me think it was on purpose.
Over 5,000 reports and it was only “elevated error rates” like that’s not outage-level. I bet they’re blaming distributed stuff again and calling it investigation. Meanwhile I’m trying to log in and it keeps acting like the app is gone, so like, what are we supposed to believe? Either it’s online or it’s not, status page wording shouldn’t matter.