LinkedIn down for thousands of users

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn was reported down for thousands of users Wednesday – just one day after Meta's Facebook and Instagram left hundreds of thousands of users locked out of their accounts for hours.

The outage started about 3:30 p.m. EST, and peaked for close to 50,000 users, according to the internet monitoring site Downdetector.com.

By 5:00 p.m. EST, Downdetector showed 65% of LinkedIn users had reported issues with the website while 32% had problems with the app.

Netblocks, a watchdog organization for internet freedoms, also reported the business-oriented social platform was “currently experiencing outages in multiple countries," and further elaborated the issues were "not related to any country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”

LinkedIn users quickly took to social media looking or answers, tagging their posts with the trending hashtag #linkedindown.

“Looks like @LinkedIn is down, not loading on mobile or browser…anyone else?” one user posted on X.

“LinkedIn is down, so people from LinkedIn are running to X. Another cyberattack??” another user said. The post was just one of many commenting on the exodus of users headed to Elon Musk’s X (formally known as Twitter) to keep tabs on the LinkedIn outage.

Monday morning, Meta’s suite of social networking platforms were out for more than 600,000 users worldwide, including the US, Europe and India.

Facebook and Instagram users were unable to access their accounts, some being told their passwords were incorrect. Other Meta-owned services, Threads and Messenger, were also affected.

Meta apologized to its users on X, while spokesperson Andy Stone said the outage was due to technical issues. But Tuesday, new information from the company’s press office hinted to Cybernews that the issue may have been the result of a hacking attempt.

“We’re working on it. There was a breach of security earlier. Please visit our status page for updates,” Meta had responded to Cybernews when inquiring about the hours-long disruption.

Additionally, three different hacktivist groups, known for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks at their targets, took credit for the outages after the fact – Skynet, Godzilla, and Anonymous Sudan.

Anonymous Sudan, the most well-known of the trio, made waves last summer successfully taking down Microsoft Outlook and threatening OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

As of 05:30 p.m. EST LinkedIn services were restored. Although Microsoft and LinkedIn have both acknowledged the brief outage, neither have commented on what was behind it.