Update, 5:50 p.m. ET: LinkedIn appears to be back up globally, though it’s still not clear what caused the outage.
It wasn’t just you. LinkedIn was experiencing a widespread outage Wednesday, with users taking to other social media sites like X and Facebook to complain. The job networking social media site was back up by the early evening.
It was unclear what caused the outage. But Down Detector had tens of thousands of complaints that appeared to have started around 3:40 p.m. ET. Netblocks reported LinkedIn was down in “multiple countries,” suggesting this was a global problem.
The outage came on the heels of 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.” But clicking on the Help Center link didn’t bring you anywhere useful. Even clicking on the “contact us” hyperlink brought you back to a LinkedIn domain that was down.
The Help Center page had this update:
Unable to locate the server; the server does not have a DNS entry. Perhaps there is a misspelling in the server name or the server no longer exists; double-check the name and try again. Please double-check the URL (address) you used, or contact us if you feel you have reached this page in error.
Social media sites saw a number of theories being floated about why LinkedIn might be down, including the kinds of conspiracy theories that surface anytime these kinds of outages happen. Many people insisted there was something suspicious about the AT&T outage late last month, comparing the outage to the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind.
Even the dictionary seemed to think something weird is happening, with Merriam-Webster’s official X account tweeting about the incident.
Reached for comment over email, a LinkedIn spokesperson directed Gizmodo to a tweet that reads, “It’s not you, it’s us. You may be experiencing issues when you try to visit LinkedIn. Our teams are working to resolve this and you can check for updates on our Status Page: https://linkedin-status.com.”