If you tried to use Chunky Guys on Wednesday or Thursday and found things broken, slow, or just not working, you weren't the only one. Bluesky was hit by a sustained DDoS attack that kicked off late on the 15th April and caused problems for up to 24 hours. Feeds wouldn't load, notifications vanished, search stopped working, and at points even Bluesky's own status page went down. It was, to put it mildly, a mess.
And because Chunky Guys currently relies on Bluesky's infrastructure to function, it was a mess for us too. When their servers struggle, our app struggles, and we couldn't do anything about it. We just had to sit there and wait for it to be fixed.
That was not a good feeling.
What actually happened
A DDoS attack is when someone floods a service with so much junk traffic that it can't handle real requests any more. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book, and while it's not the kind of attack that compromises your data (Bluesky have confirmed no user data was accessed), it can absolutely cripple a platform if the right protections aren't in place.
Here's the thing though: this is a largely solved problem. Services exist specifically to absorb this kind of attack. They sit in front of your infrastructure, filter out the junk, and let the real traffic through. Most platforms of any significant size use them as standard. It's not exotic technology. It's basic operational hygiene.
Bluesky, apparently, chose to handle it themselves. And it took them the better part of a day to get things stable again. During that time, every app and service built on their infrastructure was collateral damage. Including us.
This also isn't an isolated incident. There have been multiple service disruptions this month alone, each met with cryptic status updates that leave users and developers guessing about what's actually going on. When you're asking communities to build on top of your platform, that's really not good enough.
Why this matters for Chunky Guys
Right now, Chunky Guys is essentially a client that sits on top of Bluesky. We have our own features (boops, member indicators, online status, media messaging), but the core social infrastructure, the feeds, the notifications, the data, all of that flows through Bluesky's servers. When they go down, we go down. We have no say in how their infrastructure is protected, no ability to route around the problem, no fallback. We're just along for the ride.
That was always the deal when we chose to build on Bluesky. We accepted the trade-off because it let us get the app into people's hands quickly instead of spending years building everything from scratch. And honestly, for a while it was the right call. But there's a difference between accepting a trade-off and accepting a single point of failure that you have zero control over. This week made that difference painfully clear.
What we're doing about it
We've been planning to build our own infrastructure for a while now. This week lit a fire under that plan.
Here's what that means in practice: we're building our own AppView, which is the service that processes and serves the data you see in the app. We're building our own firehose consumer; which is how we'll pull in data from across the network independently, rather than relying on Bluesky to do it for us. Work on this has already started. And all of it will be hosted in Europe, on infrastructure we control, completely separate from Bluesky.
The goal is simple: the next time Bluesky has a bad day, Chunky Guys keeps working. Your feeds load. Your messages send. Your notifications arrive. Our app, our infrastructure, our responsibility.
We're not the only ones thinking this way either. Blacksky was able to ride out this week's outage because they've already built their own independent infrastructure. Eurosky and Northsky are both accelerating similar plans. Right across the ATProto community, projects are waking up to the same reality: depending entirely on one company's infrastructure, and that company's ability to keep it running, is a risk that needs managing. Sooner rather than later.
This is why we build in Europe
We've talked before about why our infrastructure runs on European servers. Data sovereignty, privacy law, keeping your data under a legal framework that actually respects it. All of that still matters, and none of it has changed. But this week added another reason to the list: resilience.
Building independent infrastructure in Europe isn't just about privacy. It's about not having a single American company be the only thing standing between our community and an outage. It's about having control over how our services are protected, how they recover, and how quickly we can respond when something goes wrong. It's about being able to look you in the eye and say "we've got this" rather than shrugging and saying "we're waiting for someone else to fix it".
We'll keep you posted
This is a big piece of work and it won't happen overnight. But it's happening, and we'll share progress as we go. In the meantime, the app is working fine right now and we'll keep doing everything we can to make sure you have a good experience, even while we're building the thing that makes it bulletproof.
As always, we want to hear from you. What matters to you? What are you worried about? What do you want us to focus on?
We're building this for you. That means building it properly.