Bluesky is growing so fast it’s racing to get hold of more servers, its COO says

• Bluesky’s user base grew to 21 million, prompting the company to scramble for more servers.

• Rose Wang, Bluesky’s COO, told Business Insider that its 20-person team is in “firefighting mode.”

• Its growth follows users leaving X, with over 280,000 closing their accounts on Election Day.

Bluesky has “blown past” its user growth forecasts so much that it is racing to get more servers to keep the site running, the social media platform’s chief executive has said.

Rose Wang told Business Insider that the influx of new users at Bluesky over the past two weeks was “quite unexpected” and that the company’s 20-person team has been in “firefighting mode.”

The social media network has surpassed 21 million users, up from 13 million in October, as X users have flocked to the platform.

But that level of scaling has come with some growing pains. Bluesky experienced an outage earlier this month, which the company said was caused by an external ISP.

To prevent further growth, it has ramped up additional server capacity in its data centers.

“We’ve grown by a million users every day for the past eight days, which has blown past our projections, and so we were going to get new servers next year, but we had to fast-track it,” Wang said.

The US election appears to have triggered a migration of X users to Bluesky, which has been praised for its similarity to the “old Twitter”. More than 280,000 people closed their X accounts on election day, data from Similarweb shows.

Gordon MacMillan, X’s former head of content strategy, previously told BI that people have been leaving the platform due to its owner, Elon Musk, using it as a political megaphone in his support of President-elect Donald Trump. He also pointed to concerns about hate speech and misinformation about X.

Wang said Bluesky’s growth has come from two areas: event-driven growth, where something happens on another platform like X, and community-driven growth, where people joined because they like the interaction on the platform.

Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal project at X, when it was still known as Twitter and Jack Dorsey was still at the helm. It launched as a separate company in 2021 with Jay Gruber as CEO.

It launched a beta version of its app last year, and users could only participate with an invite code until February. Dorsey left the board in May when it transitioned to a corporate structure, telling Wired that it was “literally repeating all the mistakes” Twitter made.

Bluesky’s ‘lightning in a bottle moment’

Wang said Bluesky caught the attention of users after Musk acquired X for $44 billion in 2022.

“There was a moment in time where right after Elon bought Twitter and before Threads launched, we had our lightning in a bottle where the whole world was aware of Bluesky and we had invite codes,” she said.

“We didn’t have invitation codes to be a ‘hot’ exclusive club, but we had invitation codes because we wanted to make sure our moderation was in place to bring many millions of people to it,” Wang added.

Wang said it was a “difficult decision” to make as a company because growth is so difficult to achieve, but “we chose to stick to our principles.”

The company has received a lot of requests from users for new features, Wang said. Some of them already exist on X, such as the ability to bookmark posts and lists of popular topics.

Wang says the team wants to build new products, but the boom in new users means its priorities have completely changed. Instead of shipping new features, Bluesky is putting its efforts on core priorities like moderation and “firefighting”.

“We wish we had the resources to build these features,” she said. “But instead, the team is focused on, let’s make sure that one, the website stays online, and two, that moderation is intact so that we respond to reports within 24 hours with global coverage, and three, that people are able to find each other and the end user has a good experience.”

The company plans to launch a paid subscription model by the end of this year, which will include features like customizable aesthetics, avatar frames, and multiple video uploads or high-resolution images.

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