Mastodon was hit by a 'major' DDoS attack that briefly took down parts of the service

Mastodon seems to be recovering after a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that took down its primary mastodon.social instance.

As TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/20/mastodon-says-its-flagship-server-was-hit-by-a-ddos-attack/" target="_blank">notes, the platform began https://status.mastodon.social/cmo730jrm05ailojla22drifc" target="_blank">reporting issues early Monday morning as much of the Mastodon-operated server became inaccessible. 

It's not clear who might be behind the attack, but Mastodon's head of communications Andy Piper https://macaw.social/@andypiper/116436859213678675" target="_blank">described it as a "major" incident.

A couple hours later, Mastodon shared on a status page that it had implemented countermeasures and that users should be able to access mastodon.social once again.

Piper said that "some ongoing instability is a possibility" as the site recovered.

It's unclear if any other instances of the service were also targeted; mastodon.social is run directly by the nonprofit and is the largest server on the federated platform. 

Mastodon is the second decentralized platform to be targeted with a DDoS in recent days.

Last week, Bluesky also dealt with a significant DDoS incident that took parts of the service offline for several hours.

The company posted what it said was its https://x.com/bluesky/status/2046274845617365039" target="_blank">final update Monday morning, saying that its service had "remained stable" and that there was "no evidence of unauthorized access to private user data." A few hours later, however, it seemed Bluesky was once again experiencing some issues, though the cause was unclear.

Its official https://status.bsky.app/" target="_blank">status page was down, and a post from its https://bsky.app/profile/status.bsky.app/post/3mjx6iwke4s2a" target="_blank">server status account indicated that there were "elevated errors and timeouts on some Bluesky-hosted services." Bluesky said it was investigating.