LinkedIn goes down following Microsoft acquisition (Update: Fixed)

Professional social network LinkedIn may be down for some users, just days after its $26.2 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Some have reported receiving a 502 error, which the company defines as “a server hangup,” while others, like myself, have received a nicer error message saying that the company’s getting “things cleaned up” and that “we’ll be back soon.”

https://twitter.com/LinkedInHelp/status/743234613334712320

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1980622,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,social,","session":"B"}']

LinkedIn’s mobile apps also appear to be affected by this outage. On an iPhone, I received an error message when perusing my News Feed — posts weren’t displayed and other sections such as messaging and notifications were slow to load.

It appears that this outage may only be affecting some of the company’s 433 million members. In a tweet from its customer service account, LinkedIn said that its team is aware of the issue and is “actively working on this!” After the service had been down for more than 10 minutes, LinkedIn issued this tweet:

https://twitter.com/LinkedInHelp/status/743239280126918656

For LinkedIn, having an outage, however brief, isn’t a common thing. The last major publicly reported downtime is believed to have occurred in 2014 when a technical issue caused the service to go down for three days. A company spokesperson at the time offered this explanation: “[The network operations team] were able to explain that while conducting regular site maintenance, we ran into an issue where particular client IP addresses were not routed correctly. The issue has been resolved.”

As mentioned earlier, this issue is occurring just two days after the company was acquired by Microsoft in a deal that’s expected to be complete later this year. LinkedIn will remain independent, at least when it comes to brand and culture, and CEO Jeff Weiner will continue to lead the company.

While it’s too early in the acquisition phase to place this outage on Microsoft, that hasn’t stopped others from making jokes. Oddly, no one has referenced Clippy.

https://twitter.com/MichaellPetch/status/743243747161300992

Updated at 7:10 p.m. Pacific on Wednesday: LinkedIn’s customer service Twitter account posted at 6:21 p.m. Pacific that the issues some users experienced today “have been cleared.” No specific reasons for the outage have been given. We have reached out to the company for additional comment.

[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1980622,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,social,","session":"B"}']

https://twitter.com/LinkedInHelp/status/743252223929421824