A sustained DDoS can hurt a social platform even when no data is stolen. The standard response misses the real damage here: repeated outages make the service feel unreliable, and that pushes users to competing networks that are already waiting to absorb them.
Bluesky said a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” has caused intermittent interruptions since April 15, affecting the app and website, including feeds, notifications, threads, and search. The company said it has seen no evidence of unauthorized access to private data, and its status page was also unavailable during the disruption.
The immediate risk is availability, but the longer-term risk is user churn. Extended outages give rival decentralized platforms a chance to capture both users and developers who decide Bluesky is not dependable enough to stay on.