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Bluesky, the Twitter/X competitor won more than a million new users since the US election faced an outage yesterday, affecting some in the Eastern Time Zone.

The app wrote on X that some residents in the eastern United States may not be able to access the app due to “network issues” on Thursday. At least one of us at PCMag encountered the problem, as the Bluesky iOS app wasn’t loading for us between late afternoon and early evening yesterday from Atlanta, Georgia.

Downdetector.com paintings a similar image, recording over 12,000 user reports yesterday between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. ET. 67% of the reports were about the Bluesky app, while 31% of the reports were about issues with the website.

The outage was caused because Cogent Communications, an Internet service provider for Bluesky, cut a fiber optic cable, causing a “loss of network connectivity,” according to The Verge. reportsquoting Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu. Liu said the outage only occurred for 15 to 30 minutes, despite the five-hour reporting window mentioned above.

Bluesky developer Paul Frazee confirmed the issue in a Bluesky job Thursday evening I wrote: “The outages are not our fault. One of our bandwidth providers apparently had their fiber cable cut and was on/off all day.”

Some Bluesky users took to X to complain about the outage, while others job about it on Bluesky once they regained access.

“Can you believe this whole site works on a Mac Mini M4”, Frazee wrote early Friday morning.

The Nov. 14 outage occurred on the “highest traffic day on record” in Bluesky. according to » to a member of the Bluesky team, who reassured users that the outage had nothing to do with the platform’s traffic spike.

Bluesky has made significant user gains globally over the past month, adding more than 1.6 million iOS users over the past month and nearly 1.7 million iOS users over the past month. from last month. Android users, according to AppFigures data. U.S. users signed up the most, accounting for 45% of iOS signups and 43% of Android signups.

While X still saw more downloads over the past month than Bluesky, Meta’s Topics beat them both. Threads saw over 19 million downloads on Android and over 11.1 million downloads on iOS worldwide in the past month, while X had 5.8 million on Android and 2.69 million on iOS .

Editor’s note: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of PCMag.