LinkedIn Site Goes Down!

LinkedIn, the global professional networking site, suffered a down time today, just 6 days after hitting 100 million subscribers. I was casually trying to access my LinkedIn profile sometime around 21:20 local time (Amsterdam, GMT +01:00) when I was told "Sit Tight: We're taking moments to clean things up" a nice landing page at linkedin.com that actually meant “LinkedIn was Down”. However the LinkedIn blog and learning center were available, since they were in different subdomains. I tried to find out if this was a scheduled down time (which of course is still not acceptable) but there was no mention of it anywhere in the web.

Reaffirming this fact, many people tweeted about the issue at the same time.

LinkedIn seems to be broken - what's happening? #linkedin at http://twitter.com/#!/marcuseast/statuses/52476531393576960

Getting a "HTTP Status 404" on #linkedin; n at http://twitter.com/#!/neeraj/statuses/52476148168400896

…and I tweeted,
#LinkedIn down? Saying "Sit Tight: We're taking moments to clean things up", just 6 days after reaching 100 million!  at http://twitter.com/#!/udayshankarab/statuses/52449964974026752

However as many users were facing this issue, the site was back up again when I verified it at around 23:00.

So what was the reason for the downtime? I did not see any official statement on this yet, however very soon @LinkedIn tweeted that the site should be back up again, acknowledging the fact that the site was down.

“All of our users should have access to the site currently. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience! ~Tony” at http://twitter.com/#!/LinkedIn/status/52481836915503104

Is it something to do with their “Bigger, better, and more reliable. LinkedIn’s new data center in Los Angeles”?, maybe not, So “Sit Tight: They’re taking moments to clean things up”


Here below are some links referring to some of the previous downtime’s of LinkedIn,

2009, Feb 03^rd| Oops! LinkedIn Goes Down, Can't Get Up
2010, Dec 11^th | LinkedIn Down While They Up-grade Data Center
2010, May 11^th | LinkedIn Down
2011, Jan 10^th | Why Is LinkedIn Down?

[Updated on 5th April 2011]

My good friend Mike just informed me that LinkedIn was down again, and yes it indeed was! What is happening there? With IPO on the table could they afford two outages in a span of 6 days?

As I write this, it looks like the site is experiencing some varying issues. The site is coming up and going down intermittently multiple times within a span of seconds. Here is what the official twitter feed say, "We're looking into site issues currently. Apologize for the inconvenience. Please stay tuned for more." At http://twitter.com/#!/LinkedIn/status/55292427778535424

However, I am not sure if this is an issue within Netherlands or within Europe? Does LinkedIn have local geographical servers that work with a central server or does it having one main server (I totally doubt such a configuration)?

It also poses some critical questions,

• What is their site failure rate in the recent past? What is causing them such frequent downtimes?
• Why are they not disclosing or even apologizing for such down times? (Yes, LinkedIn is not public, but there is no rule that a non-public firm should not, especially considering the fact that LinkedIn is closely associated to 50 million professionals!)
• Isn't LinkedIn able to handle it's own exponential growth?
• Is it a technical bottleneck or error in judgement of demand?
• Does it have capable resources to manage their growth rate or struggling to procure them?
• Is the duration of usage per person significantly increasing as well?

I can only ask! Who CAN ANSWER? (Or do we, the 50 million professionals even have a right to ask?)


[Update]
Site is back with no issues now. It took close to 2 hours for fixing this issue. Here is the tweet from @LinkedIn. "The site is up and running for all our users. Sorry for the inconvenience earlier today. ~Tony" at http://twitter.com/#!/LinkedIn/status/55322353374208000

[Unlike my other blog posts, this is not something that I fancy to blog about. I was personally intrigued about this down time and did some googling around, later to which I thought, why not share it!]