Downtime on the Rise at LinkedIn?

LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, has been hit with a spate of outages, including more than an hour of downtime last night. Pingdom has a report on the site’s recent issues, and wonders whether LinkedIn is experiencing scaling challenges, noting its one-year growth from 14 million users to 25 million.

Periodic outages are nothing new for LinkedIn, which placed in the middle of the pack in Pingdom’s ranking of social network downtime earlier this year, with 4 hours of downtime in the first two months of 2008. But in the last five weeks LinkedIn has been offline for more than 9 hours, including a 5 hour outage on Sept. 6. In August LinkedIn announced that it had expanded its infrastructure in a Chicago data center operated by Equinix (EQIX). 

I’m a casual LinkedIn user (here’s my profile). But it’s clear that many folks in our industry use LinkedIn, and the site features a growing number of discussion groups for data center professionals, including the new Data Center Pulse group founded by Dean Nelson from Sun and Mark Thiele from VMware.