- Bluesky's user base surged to 21 million, prompting the company to race to get 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 projections so much that it's racing to get more servers to keep the site running smoothly, the social media platform's chief operating officer 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 left in droves and 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 due to an external internet provider.
To preempt further growth, it has expedited additional server capacity at its data centers.
"We have grown by a million users every day for the last eight days, which has blown past our projections, and so we were going to get new servers next year, but we had to fast forward that," Wang said.
The US election appears to have triggered a migration of X users to Bluesky, which has been praised because of 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 because of its owner, Elon Musk, using it as a political megaphone in his support for president-elect Donald Trump. He also pointed to concerns over hate speech and misinformation on X.
Wang said that Bluesky's growth has come from two areas: event-driven growth, where something happens on a different 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 join with an invite code until February. Dorsey exited the board of directors in May as it shifted towards a corporate structure and told Wired that it was "literally repeating all the mistakes" Twitter made.
Bluesky's 'lightning in the bottle moment'
Wang said that Bluesky caught the attention of users after Musk acquired X for $44 billion in 2022.
"There was a moment in time when right after Elon bought Twitter and before Threads launched, we had our lightning in the bottle moment where the whole world was paying attention to Bluesky, and we had invite codes," she said.
"We didn't have invite codes to be a 'hot' exclusive club, but we had invite codes because we wanted to make sure our moderation was in place to bring on many millions of people," Wang added.
Wang said it was a "hard decision" to make as a company because growth is so hard to come by, 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 those already exist on X, such as the ability to bookmark posts and lists of trending topics.
Wang says the team wants to build new products, but the boom in new users means its priorities have completely shifted. Instead of shipping new features, Bluesky is placing its efforts on core priorities like moderation and "firefighting."
"We wish we had the resources to go and build those 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 are responding to reports within 24 hours with global coverage, and three, that people are able to find each other and the end user is having a good experience."
The company plans to launch a paid subscription model by the end of this year, which will include features such as customizable aesthetics, avatar frames, and more video uploads or high-resolution images.