Bluesky reveals recent outage was caused by major DDoS attack

• Bluesky confirms 24‑hour outage was caused by a DDoS attack on August 17 2026
• Researchers linked it to Iraq‑313 Team, using DiamWall‑based DDoS‑for‑hire infrastructure
• Company upgraded defenses; no details yet on attackers, traffic origin, or user impact

The recent outage on Bluesky was the result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the company has confirmed.

Bluesky is a decentralized social media platform which is rather similar to X, since it allows users to post short messages and multimedia. Its key difference is the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol) upon which it was built, and which allows users and developers more control compared to other social networks.

On Sunday, August 16 2026, users started reporting problems accessing Bluesky. On Reddit, users from the US, UK, France, and other countries, said they were having issues loading the Bluesky website and app, or accessing their feeds. A day later, on August 17, Bluesky said it suffered a DDoS attack that lasted roughly 24 hours.

Iranians claim the attack

The company did not say who the attackers were, where the malicious traffic originated from, or if any specific DDoS infrastructure was used in the attack. It also did not say how many people were affected, but stressed that it upgraded its defenses and was continuing to monitor the situation.

At the same time, security researchers took to the IFIN public forum to discuss the attacks, saying they saw The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq-313 Team, an Iran-backed threat actor, take responsibility for the attack, as well as for a similar DDoS strike on GitHub. It sounds plausible, since we’ve seen the 313 Team use DDoS to target similar services in the past, including Spotify and Ubuntu.

Their initial research suggests the crooks used DDoS-for-hire infrastructure that relies on DiamWall which, in turn, seems to be using IP addresses supplied by a China-based reseller. This does not mean the attack traffic came from China, or that Chinese entities were involved in the attack.

Via TechCrunch