Bluesky Suffers Outage As People Flee Twitter’s New Restrictions

On Saturday, Twitter users were extremely frustrated after Elon Musk announced that the majority of users would only be able to see 600 tweets a day. While many users are now using sites such as Bluesky to replace Twitter, the site seems to be experiencing problems of its own. The invitation-only website has actually halted all new registrations due to the number of people who are leaving Twitter in favor of Bluesky.

“We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues,” the official Bluesky account wrote at 5:15 p.m. ET.

“We’ll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality. We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!” the account continued.

Bluesky, a new social media platform from Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter), was released in February. Bluesky is almost identical to Twitter. The only downsides are that Bluesky is currently invite-only and doesn’t yet allow for video uploads. Bluesky also doesn’t have direct messages, though some people who are often harassed on social media platforms may see that as a positive feature.

But Twitter power users need an alternative and other competitors don’t really fit the bill. Facebook isn’t great for breaking news, Instagram is focused on images over text, TikTok is all about video and the other text-based alternatives are largely run by extreme partisans. Truth Social for example, was created by Donald Trump.

Bluesky seemed to be a practical alternative for most people, though it’s unclear when it might become open to everybody. Bluesky has the potential to be a real competitor to Twitter if it can handle all the users.

Musk insists that the new limits on reading tweets are temporary and a result of what he calls “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation.” But there are plenty of other theories about what’s going on.

Twitter used Google’s cloud-based services and reportedly just stopped paying its bills recently. Tech news site Platformer reported on June 10 that there was a “mad rush” to move many of Twitter’s data away from Google. Twitter’s contract with Google reportedly expired on June 30, which was yesterday.

Musk resigned from his CEO role at Twitter to hire Linda Yaccarino. She was hired for her vast experience in ad-sales at NBC Universal. But there’s always been a lingering question about how much control Musk would actually hand over, given his reputation for being an extremely hands-on boss. After Musk became the new Twitter CEO, many major brands halted their spending. Some even expressed concern at being seen with Musk during a marketing conference.

Musk continues to insist Twitter is close to being profitable, though it’s not clear if that’s because he’s stopped paying many of the social media company’s bills. Twitter stopped paying its landlords, and it was recently forced to vacate an office in Boulder, Colorado. Twitter has filed a counter suit this week.

Tweetdeck appears to allow Twitter users to increase the amount of tweets that can be viewed in a day. But if you like using Twitter for more than, say, half an hour in a day, you’re going to be out of luck. If Twitter’s competitors, like Bluesky can pull together their act, this could be a great opportunity.