It wasn’t just you. LinkedIn experienced a widespread outage on Wednesday, with users taking to other social media sites like X and Facebook to complain. By the early evening, the job networking social media site was restored.
It was unclear what caused the outage. But DownDetector received tens of thousands of complaints that appeared to have started around 3:40 p.m. ET. Netblocks reported that LinkedIn was down in multiple countries, suggesting that this was a global problem.
The outage followed other significant outages from websites like Facebook and Instagram, which both went down for several hours on Tuesday.
Anyone trying to visit LinkedIn from the U.S. saw a graphic that read, ‘An error has occurred’, along with an explanation that directs users to the ‘Help Center’. Clicking on the Help Center link did not lead you to any useful information. Even clicking on the ‘contact us’ hyperlink brought you back to a LinkedIn domain that was down.
Social media sites saw a number of theories being floated about why LinkedIn might be down, including the kinds of conspiracy theories that surface whenever these kinds of outages happen. Many people insisted there was something suspicious about the AT&T outage late last month, comparing it to the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind.
Even the dictionary seems to think something strange is happening, with Merriam-Webster’s official Twitter account tweeting about the incident.
On Tuesday, Meta Platforms caused a meme frenzy on X after its platform stopped working for an hour. More than a thousand users, including comedian Vira Das, Shark Tank India’s Anupam Mital, and X CEO Elon Musk, jumped to comment on the outage.
Mocking Meta, Musk wrote, ‘If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.’ Responding to his post, Mark Zuckerberg wrote, ‘It’s because I let them in.’
