Microsoft boss Satya Nadella speaks at the DLD (Digital-Life-Design) conference in Munich, Germany, January 16, 2017. Guests of the three-day conference discussed trends and developments in digitization.
Tobias Hase | photo alliance | Getty Images
The business social network LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, ran into technical issues during US business hours on Tuesday, causing people to report their problems 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 play a key role for recruiters, job seekers, and salespeople, and marketers rely on it to show ads to users.
The service has also become a more popular place to learn during the pandemic. Hours spent on the LinkedIn Learning service doubled year over year in the fourth quarter, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, told analysts last month during a conference call.
LinkedIn first started telling people in tweets that it was in the process of troubleshooting around 2 p.m. Eastern Time. Shortly afterwards, confirmed the deteriorated experience on mobile devices and the website on desktop computers in a tweet.
The service began to restore 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 was due to a configuration change in internal systems, a LinkedIn representative told CNBC.
Some people trying to access the LinkedIn website during the downtime encountered an error message along with a series of random letters and numbers – a different type of error message than those people have encountered on Amazon, which was accompanied by photos of dogs.
Another message some users saw when trying to visit LinkedIn’s website said that “the server has no DNS entry.”
Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016 for $ 27 billion. Nadella said in January that LinkedIn had nearly 740 million members. About 6% of the company’s revenue comes from LinkedIn.
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