LinkedIn suffers site outage due to 'DNS issue'
The business networking site's home page is replaced by a domain sales page for about an hour.
LinkedIn is battling a DNS issue that took the business social networking site offline for an hour Wednesday night.
The outage, which appears to be over for most of LinkedIn's members, began when the site's homepage was replaced by a domain sales page. (See The Next Web for screenshot.) An hours-long service disruption began affecting the site around 6 p.m. PT, according to DownRightNow.com.
The site's operators explained via Twitter that the outage was caused by a "DNS issue" but did not elaborate.
Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, we're continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience.
— LinkedIn (@LinkedIn) June 20, 2013
Meanwhile, App.net co-founder Bryan Berg claimed that LinkedIn's DNS was "hijacked" and that all its traffic was sent to a network hosted by Confluence Networks.
"They don't require SSL, so if you tried to visit, your browser sent your long-lived session cookies in plaintext," he wrote.
Security has been a sticky situation for LinkedIn in the past. The DNS issue emerges a little more than a year after the professional networking site confirmed that some 6.5 million of its members' passwords had been stolen and uploaded to a Russian hacker server.
CNET has contacted LinkedIn and Confluence Networks for comment and will update this report when we learn more.