Liberal-leaning social media site Bluesky crashed as two million new users joined after Twitter owner Elon Musk was appointed to Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
Developers warned that the site was likely to take action on Thursday, although they did not cite the massive influx of Twitter refugees as the cause.
Samuel Newman said Bluesky was temporarily in read-only mode “because something fell over” – and once it recovered it was still slow.
‘Today will be interesting! If the site is down, maybe grab a soda, pet the cat. We will hit it with a wrench as soon as possible,” wrote his colleague Paul Frazee.
Frazee warned users to expect messages and links to appear as if they were not working or had not been posted because the site was slow to load.
More than a million users have joined Bluesky since Trump appointed Musk co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday.
Trump said Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would “dismantle” the $6.5 trillion federal government by co-leading the “Manhattan Project of our time.”
About 2.1 million people have signed up and the number of active users has doubled since Nov. 6, when Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the election to Trump.
More than a million users have signed up for Bluesky since Donald Trump appointed Twitter owner Elon Musk as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday
Twitter, now branded as
Yet 115,000 American users were also deactivated, a daily record under Musk’s tenure.
Bluesky is visually almost indistinguishable from X, with the logo being a butterfly in the same shade of blue as the former Twitter bird.
It was originally created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2019 and grew after Musk’s acquisition of the social media giant.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, also launched Threads last year, which is much bigger with 15 million new accounts added this month alone – the same as the total number of Bluesky users.
Both are said to have liberal-leaning user bases that can seem like left-wing echo chambers due to algorithms.
Conversely, Twitter has shifted to the right since Musk bought it, while those on the left have steadily turned left or stopped using it in favor of Threads or nothing.
Outraged by Musk’s support and promotion of Trump, record numbers fled the Tesla tycoon’s social media platform. including the singer Lizzowho jokingly called the move to Bluesky ‘the great migration’.
Bluesky tops the iPhone App Store rankings, well ahead of X at 25th
The Guardian also said it would no longer post on the “toxic” site after the November 5 vote, complaining about the way Musk used Twitter’s “influence to shape political discourse.”
The boycott of the left-wing newspaper also cited its ‘often disturbing content’, such as ‘extreme right-wing conspiracy theories and racism’.
Bluesky shot to the top spot in the iPhone App Store on Wednesday – ahead of Meta’s X/Twitter competitor Threads, ChatGPT and Google.
Meanwhile, X ranks 25th in the rankings of free apps, behind McDonald’s, Facebook, YouTube, Indeed and Amazon.