Microsoft boss Satya Nadella speaking at the DLD (Digital-Life-Design) conference in Munich, Germany, 16 Janaury 2017. Guests at the 3-day conference discussed trends and developments in digitalisation.
Tobias Hase | picture alliance | Getty Images
The Microsoft-owned LinkedIn business social network ran into technical issues during U.S. business hours on Tuesday, leading people to post about their troubles accessing the LinkedIn website and app.
During the coronavirus pandemic, online services that enable communication, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom, have experienced occasional outages. LinkedIn doesn’t play that role, but it does provide serve a key role for recruiters, jobseekers and salespeople, and marketers rely on it to display advertisements to users.
The service has also become a more popular place to learn during the pandemic. The number of hours spent on the LinkedIn Learning service doubled year over year in the fourth quarter, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, told analysts on a conference call last month.
LinkedIn first started telling people in tweets that it was working to resolve issues at around 2 p.m. Eastern time. Shortly after that confirmed the degraded experience on mobile devices and its website on desktop computers in a tweet.
The service began to recover for certain users just before 3 p.m. Eastern time, and at 4:21 p.m. Eastern time LinkedIn said in a tweet that it was “back on track.”
The downtime resulted from a configuration change in internal systems, a LinkedIn representative told CNBC.
Some people attempting to access the LinkedIn website during the downtime encountered an error message along with a string of random letters and numbers — a different type of error message from the one people have run into on Amazon that has been accompanied by photos of dogs.
A different message some users saw in attempts to visit LinkedIn’s website said that “the server does not have a DNS entry.”
Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $27 billion in 2016. Nadella said in January that LinkedIn had almost 740 million members. About 6% of the company’s revenue comes from LinkedIn.
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