Bluesky Goes Down for 13 Hours – Still More Reliable Than Internet in Most Remote Aboriginal Communities

SYDNEY – Social media platform Bluesky experienced a major outage on Thursday with home and explore feeds going down across the US and Europe for over 13 hours – giving approximately 30 million users a brief taste of what daily internet access feels like in remote Aboriginal communities across Australia.

The outage – attributed to an upstream provider issue and a potential denial-of-service attack – left users unable to load feeds or view posts. Many turned to the platform formerly known as Twitter to complain about not being able to access their alternative to the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“Thirteen hours without social media and they’re all carrying on like it’s the end of the world” said one digital literacy worker from a remote community in the NT. “We’ve got communities running the entire health system off a satellite connection that drops out every time it rains. Which in the Top End is six months of the year.”

Bluesky’s status page confirmed the platform’s uptime had been approximately 99.98 per cent before Thursday’s event. By comparison internet reliability in some remote communities has been estimated at significantly lower – with some areas relying on connections originally installed when Kevin Rudd was still considered progressive.

Users across Europe and the US reported seeing error messages reading “Failed to load feeds” and “Rate Limit Exceeded” – phrases that remote community workers say they see so often they’ve started using them as metaphors for government service delivery.

“Rate Limit Exceeded is basically the official slogan of Indigenous Affairs” the digital worker added.