Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups because so many people are joining from Twitter

Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx of new users has been a problem.

“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!”

Bluesky’s status page currently 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, Bluesky said in a post that it it’s dealing with “record-high traffic.” It’s also pushing out mobile app updates to try and fix things, according to 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.