Bluesky experiences 'record-high traffic' after Elon Musk imposes rate limits on Twitter

Twitter rival Bluesky said it experienced "record-high traffic" Saturday aft Elon Musk, Twitter's enforcement president and CTO, said the tract volition temporarily limit the fig of posts users tin work per day.

Musk wrote successful a tweet that owed to "extreme levels of information scraping" and "system manipulation," verified accounts, unverified accounts and caller unverified accounts volition beryllium taxable to antithetic limits connected the societal media site. Musk changed the limits respective times connected Saturday, at 1 constituent announcing that verified accounts could presumption 10,000 posts a day, portion unverified accounts could presumption 1,000 and caller unverified accounts could presumption 500. Users study seeing a "Rate bounds exceeded" mistake connection erstwhile they person viewed their allotted fig of posts.

As a result, radical person been turning to Bluesky, an emerging text-based societal media tract backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Bluesky is inactive successful an invite-only beta phase, and the institution said successful a station Saturday that its systems were experiencing "some degraded show arsenic a effect of record-high traffic." The level besides had to temporarily intermission sign-ups to code show issues.

Bluesky resumed sign-ups precocious Sunday.

Twitter answered CNBC's petition for remark with an automated response. Bluesky did not instantly respond to a petition for comment.

Bluesky was primitively incubated wrong Twitter backmost successful 2019 erstwhile Dorsey was inactive CEO. The app runs connected a decentralized networking exertion called the AT Protocol, which successful mentation could powerfulness aboriginal societal apps, enabling radical to support their identities crossed aggregate platforms.

In February 2022, members of the Bluesky project created the Bluesky Public Benefit LLC, with Jay Graber arsenic CEO and Dorsey arsenic 1 of the founding committee members. The company announced on Twitter successful April 2022 that it received $13 cardinal successful backing "to guarantee we person the state and independency to get started connected R&D."

By the extremity of April this year, Bluesky reached much than 50,000 users, according to its website.

Bluesky is not the lone emerging Twitter competitor. The decentralized messaging app Mastodon attracted important involvement successful November, and societal media elephantine Meta previously confirmed to CNBC that it was "exploring a standalone decentralized societal web for sharing substance updates."

Meta whitethorn beryllium readying for launch, arsenic The Verge reported Saturday that Meta's Twitter competitor, called Threads, concisely appeared successful the Google Play store.

Meta did not instantly respond to CNBC's petition for comment.

— CNBC's Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.