LinkedIn Website Experiences Downtime

Online business network provider LinkedIn was offline for approximately an hour on Friday morning after a key update to the website in addition to a message post from Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates.

Kay Luo, a spokesperson from LinkedIn, says she had no direct information on the source of the outage, though she said that the website had elevated traffic than usual after the new features were launched on Thursday. There were also succinct scheduled outages on Wednesday and Thursday to allow the company to roll out the features, says Luo.

One of the latest features enables LinkedIn’s 19 million members to broadcast their daily actions to their connections, similar to the “status” feature on Facebook.

On Friday, Gates furthermore posted a question to LinkedIn’s boards, asking the question, “How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?” Despite the technical glitches, Gates received more than 2,000 responses from the network of professionals, says LinkedIn.

The website was fully restored and back to usual by about 11:30 a.m. EST on Friday, says the company.