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Is LinkedIn having scaling issues?

LinkedIn, the popular social network for professionals, has had several periods of downtime lately. The last one came last evening (US time), and lasted just over an hour.

The website’s recurring availability issues are making us wonder if LinkedIn has perhaps started to run into scaling issues. According to their website, LinkedIn currently has more than 25 million users, compared to 14 million a year ago. That’s almost a doubling of their user base in just a year.

LinkedIn outages in September and October

Here are the latest outages, in reverse chronological order (detected by Pingdom’s own monitoring of www.linkedin.com):

  • Oct 9: 1h 5m of continuous downtime in the evening, US time.
  • Oct 2: 2h 30m of downtime spread over the day, including a one-hour outage and several shorter ones lasting 10-25 minutes each.
  • Sep 23: A 30-minute outage in the evening, US time.
  • Sep 6: 5h 25m of continuous downtime, starting in the evening, US time.

The longest outage for LinkedIn so far in 2008 occurred on September 6 (a Saturday), when the site was down for more than five hours, starting at 09:31 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

According to LinkedIn, this specific outage was due to maintenance work on their front end load balancer. LinkedIn did put up a maintenance message some time into the outage. (See screenshots further down.)

So far in 2008, LinkedIn.com has been unavailable for a total of more than 33 hours.

The nature of the problem

LinkedIn’s downtime doesn’t seem to be network-related. Every time the LinkedIn website has been unavailable, the error we have recorded is an HTTP 500 server error. It’s an unspecified “internal server error” reply from the web server which basically means that it’s unable to serve the requested page.

Australian blogger Mark Aufflick was able to take some screenshots of the LinkedIn website during the September 6 outage, which he has kindly let us include here below. You will also see a message from LinkedIn in the comments to his post, explaining the cause of the outage.


Screenshots courtesy of Mark Aufflick.

Is LinkedIn a victim of its own growth?

Aside from the already stated user base increase, third-party data from Google Trends for Websites shows that the number of daily visitors to the LinkedIn website is increasing steadily. Even if the absolute numbers reported by Google are estimates and won’t be 100% accurate, the trend is what counts here.

This is just speculation, but has LinkedIn started to run into scaling issues? It happens to most growing social networks at one point or another. Perhaps it’s LinkedIn’s turn now?

All monitoring performed by the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.

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9 Comments

Perhaps it’s the economy and lots of people posting resumes.

This is one case where a bad economy might help a firm!

@Ken: You may actually have a point there. Not that it will be the only factor, but it’s an interesting perspective.

Looks like LinkedIn is partially down again, although their home page is up, and it is possible to accept new connections (of the linkedin variety). (at least as of 11:50 am Jan 2 New Zealand calendar/time)

My company are regularly experiencing linkedin being down, we have had an intermittent service during last 2 days (Feb 2nd and 3rd), very frustrating. Is there a specific reason that anyone knows of?
I have sent a mail to their customer support and await a reply.

I consistantly have problems with Linkedin freezing on my laptop. I cannot seem to get it fixed. any ideas?

A friend of mine called the main Linkedin number and they weren’t aware of any problems at all…

As there’s no communication from the LI folks to members and they have no interest in a real customer service department, they will fail…

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Weekend must-read articles #2

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom Podcast #5

Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

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