Social media platform Bluesky, an application considered to be an alternative to Elon Musk’s X, suffered a brief outage in some parts of the world on Thursday, with some users complaining they weren’t getting any notifications. The crash comes amidst rising popularity for the application post Donald Trump’s win in the United States Presidential polls.
A spokesperson of Bluesky, a company co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, said the outage was due to external factors. Emily Liu, Bluesky's spokesperson told the BBC, “One of the internet providers had some downtime, apparently because a fibre cable was out. That means it happened outside of our company.” The company said not all users suffered the outage and the issue was resolved on Thursday itself.
Bluesky has seen a surge in its popularity since the results of the US elections were out. Netizens cite tech giant Elon Musk’s (who owns X) backing for Trump as one of the reasons for users leaving the platform. Musk strongly backed Trump during the elections and he even watched voting results come in with President-elect. However, X claimed it saw 15.5 per cent jump in new-user sign-ups on Election Day.
Trump recently announced Musk will be part of his administration and he, along with Vivek Ramaswamy will be run the Department of Government Efficiency.
Also read
- Ethnic bioweapons, mercury-laced sandwiches: Trump's new health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is a conspiracy theorist
- Should Indian IT companies be concerned over the likely appointment of Stephen Miller in Trump's new regime?
- After Dunki, will the study route to the US be clamped shut for Indian students under Trump part two?
- Trump hints at 2028 presidential run. But can he amend the US Constitution?
Bluesky recently said there was an increase in its downloads in the US and the UK and its total users have surged to 15 million, two million more from roughly 13 million at the end of October. The application is considered to be a friendlier alternative to X. In October, About 500,000 new users signed up within a day, when X signalled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user's public posts, AP reported.
Meanwhile, Instagram’s Threads, another X alternative owned by Meta, said that over 1 million users signed up in the last 24 hours. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that Threads had seen more than 15 million sign-ups in November and the platform has had 1 million sign-ups a day for the last three months.
