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DNS Issue Affects LinkedIn and Causes Outage

By VJ
If you checked LinkedIn, the social network for professionals circa eight hours ago, you might have noticed the service was not available. It instead displayed this particular website (image from TNW):

TNW shows LinkedIn hijacked page

Approximately eight hours ago, an outage spanning several hours was noticed on LinkedIn, and the people started worrying that the service was being hacked into. Here are the outage details from DownRightNow:

LinkedIn down more than six hours ago

However, LinkedIn later confirmed on Twitter that the outage was caused by a DNS issue. Here’s the tweet:


What is the DNS issue they are talking about? Every website has to be tied to a specific IP address or a range of IPs. Although the website has a domain name (bluebugle.org, linkedin.com, google.com, etc.), this domain name has to be resolved to an IP address in order to correctly locate the website’s servers. In the case of LinkedIn, the IP address is 216.52.242.86. Check this out (click to enlarge):

DNS propagation chart of LinkedIn

The DNS propagation chart of LinkedIn shows that it is correctly identified in all locations at this time. The IP address not only identifies the domain name linkedin.com, but also other domains associated with LinkedIn Corporation, such as linkedin.bg, lnkd.in, linkedin.it, linkedin.com.au, etc.

When the service disruption happened, a probable DNS hijack did occur and the LinkedIn redirected to a different IP address, specifically one belonging to the network service provider called Confluence Networks. This was the reason why the entire website was replaced by quite a different kind of home page, more specifically an ad-ridden MFA-style site you saw above.

LinkedIn is already back in service now, with occasional non-fatal outages experienced by all kinds of services.
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