LinkedIn Outage Affecting Thousands

Website outage tracker Downdetector had nearly 9,000 reports of LinkedIn issues as of 2:20 p.m. ET. LinkedIn’s social support team took to Twitter and called it a “glitch.’

LinkedIn, the professional networking site owned by Microsoft, suffered an outage affecting thousands of users.

According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, the outage started at 1:50 p.m. ET with more than 6,000 reports of issues with LinkedIn. As of 2:20 p.m. ET, LinkedIn had more than 8,700 reports of issues accessing the site. according to Downdetector. About 35 minutes later, the reports of issues were down signitificantly to 577.

On Twitter, LinkedIn users complained about not being able to search and pages coming up blank.

Seems like @LinkedIn is having an outage where the search does not work, and pages come back empty. @LinkedInHelp:

— Gadi Shamia (@gadishamia) November 17, 2022

LinkedIn’s social support team said on Twitter in response to one complaint that it is “currently working on a fix. We appreciate your patience while they work to resolve this glitch. Please check back with us later in the day as we hope to have this resolved as soon as possible! Thanks.”

Hi there! Our team is aware of this and currently working on a fix. We appreciate your patience while they work to resolve this glitch. Please check back with us later in the day as we hope to have this resolved as soon as possible! Thanks. -SH

— LinkedIn Help (@LinkedInHelp) November 17, 2022

CRN has reached out to LinkedIn’s press team for comment.

David Stinner, president and founder of US itek, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based MSP, said the rapid response from users complaining about the LinkedIn problems is a sign of just how unforgiving users are for any kind of outage, downtime or technical problems.

“LinkedIn is used everyday by human resources and for sales and marketing, it’s pretty important in today’s world to operate and use a LinkedIn account,” he said. “That said, I think it is unrealistic for people to think that every system needs to be available instantaneously 100 percent of the time.”

Stinner compared the cloud to the electrical grid, noting that the very first long distance transmission of electricity was from Niagara Falls New York to Buffalo New York 126 years ago almost to the day.

“That took place right here where I am today in Buffalo,” he said. “Even now 126 years later there are still occasional outages with the electrical grid.”

In fact, Stinner said, just today he got an email from the electric company telling him that his lake house in the country had a power outage for one hour and 10 minutes.

“I can’t be upset about that,” he said. “My point is that we have unrealistic expectations for these cloud systems,” he said. “People are so inpatient. They want instant access to everything and instant gratification. Think of how far we have come and how the cloud got us through the pandemic and allowed us all to work from home. So maybe LinkedIn is down an hour or two over the course of a year. We all have to learn to be more forgiving.”

Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016 with a focus on growing the professional networking site and integrating it with Microsoft’s enterprise software, such as Office 365.