LinkedIn suffers outage due to ‘DNS issue’

PanARMENIAN.Net - Business-focused social network LinkedIn is continuing to recover from a DNS error that took the site offline for an hour. The outage began when the popular service’s homepage was replaced by a domain sales page, The Next Web reports.

While the outage appears to have stopped, some users are still saying (via Twitter) that they cannot access linkedin.com, although none are seeing the incorrect page, TNW says

LinkedIn explained the outage was caused by “a DNS issue”, but provided no further details. Others have speculated that there may have been more malicious factors at play.

“Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, we're continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience,” the network tweeted.

App.net co-founder Bryan Berg suggested that the service was “hijacked” with all traffic sent to a network hosted by India-based Confluence Networks. Furthermore, due to the lack of SSL security on the site, Berg says that could have meant if you visited the page “your browser sent your long-lived session cookies in plain text” — potentially enabling third-parties to access user information and accounts.

However, according to TNW, a Hacker News user claiming to work with LinkedIn’s network operations center argued that the outage was down to a mistake from LinkedIn’s DNS provider, which accidentally pointed the website’s homepage to a domain parking page. Rather amusingly that put the linkedin.com domain up for sale.