Brightkite has been growing significantly, which is great for everyone. The flip side of this coin is that we have been attracting an increasing number of spammers. In the last week we’ve seen spammers posting (and attempting to post) into Brightkite hundreds of times a second, 24/7. This has caused two issues:

1. The service has become increasingly slow which has caused a series of secondary issues (inability to pull friends streams, app crashes, freezes, etc)
2. Some of this spam is showing up in streams

Without going into too many details, we are focusing on the first issue for now, to make sure that spammers can’t degrade the service for the rest of us. Once that’s done we’ll increase efforts to prevent spam entering the streams.

We are really sorry that many of you are seeing the effects of the problem, and promise that we are working hard to fix things.