LinkedIn may be profitable and growing fast, but something seems to be going very wrong with the business social networking service today. The service has been going up and down all day over here in Europe, and has now been displaying an ‘Oops’ page for the past 55 minutes (4:30 PM CET).
Update: it’s back up, downtime lasted exactly one hour.
Update 2: and it’s back down again (4:45 PM CET), they’re having serious technical issues over there.
Update 3: it’s bouncing up and down. Seems to be stable now (4:52 PM CET)
As we’ve learned from people e-mailing us about us (and comments on this post and on Twitter), LinkedIn seems to have been dealing with various technical problems for weeks now. We’re getting LinkedIn’s side of the story and will update this post asap.
It’s a very unusual thing to happen with LinkedIn, which has always had quite a reliable web service, and there’s no official update to be found on the LinkedIn Blog (which is still up). Meanwhile, Twitter users are spreading the word about its current downtime fast.
We got in touch with Pingdom, who states:
LinkedIn started having intermittent problems around 5:30 a.m. US EST. The errors we are getting from them are HTTP 500 errors (internal server error). At 9:36 a.m. US EST the site went down and has kept returning errors since (HTTP 500 errors). As of this writing it’s been that way for 55 minutes.
Update 4: The problem was too many backed up messages, specifically LinkedIn’s Message Queuing. Explanation is up on the LinkedIn Blog:
Many of you trying to use LinkedIn between 2:18am and 4:08am US Pacific time this morning, and all of you trying to use LinkedIn between 6:10am and 7:43am, were unable to get in. This is not what we want for our users, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused. Rest assured, all of your postings and messages were sent out.
What caused the outage? LinkedIn uses a technology called “Message Queuing” within our site to allow our various services (for example, Network Update Service, inMails) to communicate with each other asynchronously, so that a sudden surge of usage on one part of the site will not affect performance on another. Starting early this morning, we ran into some issues with our Message Queuing services, which caused the message queues to back up.
Without good business social networking service, LinkedIn can’t success.
but at least linkedin has good spelling
No, they have bad spelling. But an extremely creative business sense. It is only networking I use and have brought in top Govt, Hollywood and Media people. I use it daily. Everything else is worthless.
Max
Twitter is up and your website is down? How embarrassing.
Ewww. Yeah I noticed yesterday and this morning. Odd because I received a few notices of new invitations. Isn’t the main office in LA? They may still be asleep. (I’m EST time.)
Nope, it’s in Silicon Valley, increasingly run by a bunch of ex-eBay folks. That should tell you something.
I think it’s rather inappropriate for pingdom to be releasing information about their customers. They did so yesterday too for Revver and another company. Should they wish to become an independant monitoring company then fine. But if LinkedIn is a customer of theirs, they should better keep that kind of information confidential, don’t you think ?
Rodrigo,
We would never release information from any of our customer’s accounts. That monitoring data is theirs and theirs alone.
However, we do have completely separate uptime monitoring set up on some websites that are of general interest to a vast amount of web users (some social networks and other widely used sites). LinkedIn was included as one of these sites.
Note again, the users’ own data is of course confidential. The data we gave TechCrunch comes from our own, separate monitoring.
I hope that clarifies that.
Peter Alguacil
Pingdom.com
“HTTP 500 errors (internal server error)”
I have been getting these occasional errors from TC since about 8:30 AM EST US.
actually, this has been happening for a few days now. When I click on a link or do a search I will get the “Sorry” page about a 1/3 of the time.
john is right – LinkedIn has been having these problems at least for 2 weeks.
Maybe you should see WHAT Linkedin is doing:
http://www.link...405376-18415298
LinkedIn is Oops! (upside your head, i say oops upside your head..) since noon: Oops! ..Sorry, we can’t display this page right now…WTF? from twitter
This is not news
That is not a comment. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
+1
Probably as a result of people like me going on there and looking for jobs…may just be a bandwidth issue. Still strange timing.
Like i said on Twitter, for a moment they became LinkedOut of order
Maybe they all took it easy when Reid Hoffman was at the WEF?
This raises the question of Linkedin and security: Is our data safe with LinkedIn? Cause a lot of pitiless marketers would pay big bucks to get their hands on this juicy database.
Slowwwww news day.
“This just in. A man crossing Maple St. in a wheelchair in downtown Peoria has brought cross-traffic to a crawl. We’ll keep you up-to-date as this earth-shattering story develops.”
Aha!
http://www.tech...tful-but-arent/
@xavierv, why should this raise that question? Have you only though of it now? Any why would technical problems put our information at greater risk? Like any free service, I don’t have any information (other than my network and even then…) on Linked In that someone couldn’t find out about me from a number of other sources. I don’t trust free services with private or valuable information.
Perhaps firing the operating CEO was a bad idea.
the mathematics of PR:
if
[downtime(site) = TRUE] AND
[TechCrunch(story) = TRUE]
THEN
success(site) = TRUE
end if
also,
| PR | = PR
(extra points for translating the common aphorism above)
Novel. The absolute value of any PR — positive or negative — is still PR.
Loved this Dave.
However, playing a devil’s advocate here – this would mean that one quick way for companies to get their story out is to “plan” an unplanned downtime and get PR
Best,
Raj
PS: I think +PR takes time and effort and it’s long term value is definitely higher than -PR
|PR| = PR stays when PR means buzz
Thoughts?
To say that downtime PR is good, especially when story shows up on Techcrunch is plain stupid. That is not PR.
People who come to TC mostly already know LinkedIn. You will not be gaining any new users when there is a downtime PR story on Techcrunch. It actually discourages current LinkedIn users from using the LinkedIn.
If you read the yesterday article about Linkedin going IPO, some comments really gave an insider view of the company. With this kind of service, and falsely claimed profit (from some comments), I would load up my shorts on this stock.
It has been my experience that Linkedin is constantly having problems, even before their latest round of funding, so much so I am asking what are they spending that money on? LI has a lot of value but they have to keep a more consistent level of service (espcially as they add 1M users very 17 days or whatever was quoted)
“It’s a very unusual thing to happen with LinkedIn” — um no. They are constantly down for updates, pages not displayed, etc. For a “business” application they are quite unreliable. If Salesforce was down as much as they are it would be all over the news. Thankfully I’m not paying for the service, if I was i’d be furious …
As a recruiter, I use linkedin each and every day and depending on the time I use it, I get a “I’m sorry but….”
This makes it difficult when I am in the midst of a search and suddenly I get an error and I have to remember where I was on the list of people.
I would like to see them allow for personal notes next to a profile like the new Google search.
I have found Linkedin to be down at LEAST twice a month. For someone who is paying $2000+ a year to access the site, this is a bit much. This has been happening all of the time for the 4 years I’ve been using Linkedin- what is the reason that one of the highest volume websites is constantly down?
Maybe someone from Linkedin can contact me and refund me and others for downtime. I’m on Facebook all of the time and it’s NEVER been down. Never.
Robert Greene
CEO & Founder
Tech Recruiters
http://www.greenesearch.com
robert@greenesearch.com
Facebook was down multiple times and they even lost some of the user preference data.
While downtime sucks, I don’t think this is a big deal. I bet it’s still at 99.8ish% of uptime.
Robert
Curious, what do you get of value for the $2000/yr?
yet these losers can go public anytime they want lmao
It goes down quite often. Almost as much as Twitter. Hold on, wait, they were both built using Ruby on Rails. There seems to be a theme here…
owned
LinkedIn is built with Java and running on Solaris.
Stop spreading FUD about Rails. I know of a Rails site that handled over a billion hits last december with zero downtime.
linked in runs on Java.
I wonder if we’ll see LinkedIn introduce a service page where issues are shown, like Zoho and Salesforce.com have been running for some time? It’s a great way to provide/disprove natter about uptime.
Another useful feature may be an easy way to export your contacts back out to Outlook or your CRM system. The integration of CRM and social networks would make this easier and also enable you to do all your commenting locally.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
i want to know that how can i add my linkedin profile into google results..
http://www.link...anoopkumarsingh
It’sMay 18th and I haven’t been able to use LinkedIn all day.
This is not a momentary problem…I haven’t been able to navigate in LinkedIN for at least a year. (It’s now May 2009).
Every ‘Pope’s death’ (as they say here in Italy) I can update my status, but that’s about it.
I find it stalls at ‘retrieving from ad.doubleclick.net
In the meantime, I can’t even contact them thru their customer service!!!
I live in Italy, and have tried Firefox, Safari & now Explorer. Still, all the same.
I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS… IT JUST HAPPENED TO ME FOR TWO DAYS I CAN’T CONNECT TO LINKEDIN I TRIED TWO DIFFERENT BROWSERS IE AND MY REGULAR FIREFOX, TWO DIFFERENT COMPUTERS AND IT KEEPS GIVING ME THE SERVER TIME OUT ERROR..I TRIED EVERYTHING, SEARCHING THROUGH DIFFERENT ENGINES LINKEDIN AND CLICKING THROUGH A MULTITUDE OF LINKS STRAIGHT TO THE SITE PAGES, NOTHING ALL TO THE SAME ERROR. IT LOOKS LIKE THEY HAVE AN ISSUE WITH LINKEDIN SERVER, AND WIDESPREAD BROKEN QUERIES, OVERFLOW, WHO DE HELL KNOWS…THIS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE I WAS HAPPY AND USED LINKEDIN ON A DAILY BASIS, EVEN MORE TAN FACEBOOK…TWO DAYS NOW, TOO MANY PEOPLE HAVING PROBLEMS APPARENTLY AND YOU CAN READ EVERYWHERE ON THE INTERNET IS WIDESPREAD AND BEEN HAPPENING FOR MONTHS IF NOT AN ENTIRE YEAR!!!!. THIS IS BS HOW CAN ANYONE AT LINKEDIN SAY ANYTHING PLEASE TECHCRUNCH HELP!!!!…HELP, HELP, HELP!!!