Twitter witnessed a huge outage that lasted for hours. This resulted due to a new policy that restricted new, non-verified, and verified paid users from having access to a limited number of tweets per day. Because of the new policy, Twitter users began to migrate to similar platforms like Bluesky, which witnessed all-time high traffic and the platform temporarily stopped the sign-up process to fix the issues.
Bluesky is a decentralized social media platform that is a bit different from Twitter. For new users, one user needs an invite to join Bluesky, and the company has confirmed it will hotfix the issue to keep the platform up and running again. They will soon resume user sign-ups on both the Android and iOS apps.
Recently, Elon Musk-owned Twitter started restricting unregistered users as an emergency measure to prevent data scraping by AI-powered bots. This led Elon Musk to announce new limits for newly registered, registered, and even verified users.
At present, a verified Twitter user can read up to 10,000 posts per day, whereas an unverified user can only read up to 1,000 posts each day, and the limit is set at 500 posts per day for newly registered users. As per Musk, this measure will reduce the “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation” on Twitter.
“We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues,” Bluesky wrote in a post. “We’ll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality. We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!”
Right now, Bluesky’s status page says the platform is experiencing “degraded performance,” with the first notice of issues at 1:47PM ET. “Degraded performance” feels like an accurate description — on the web, “ I can still usually get posts to load, though they often take a very long time. Things seem a bit smoother for me on the iOS app.”
At 2:03PM ET, in a post, Bluesky said that it it’s dealing with “record-high traffic.” It’s also pushing out mobile app updates to try and fix things, as per Bluesky engineer Paul Frazee.
The issues with Twitter first cropped up on Friday when the platform started blocking unregistered users, which owner Elon Musk claimed was a “temporary emergency measure” because it was getting “data pillaged so much” that it was affecting things for regular users. On Saturday, Musk announced new limits for how many tweets users can see in a day.
Mastodon is apparently also seeing a big spike in users. According to one tracker, the platform has seen more than 26,000 new accounts in the last day.
A Twitter user also shared how Bluesky registration is on hold at present as they can’t handle the humongous onboarding.
“So I finally got my invite to Bluesky and when I registered it said registration is on hold, turns out they can’t handle the onboarding which is a common complaint with Mastadon. Bluesky is small so having problems this early suggests it may be a rough road,” the tweet read.
A huge number of Twitter users are writing about how they are shifting to Bluesky and are also encouraging others to join them on the platform.
