If you blog, or have any sort of web presence, your visitor log is an amazing source of information, you just have to know how to use it. Sometimes I discover news based on the keyword searches that lead to my blog.
This morning I knew LinkedIn was in trouble when I saw significant traffic hitting my personal blog from the Google search linkedin outage:
How this old post got to the top of Google is beyond me… but of course the increased interest meant the primary business networking site was likely down. And indeed it was, confirmed TechCrunch:
LinkedIn may be profitable and growing fast, but something seems to be going very wrong with the business social networking service today. The service has been going up and down all day over here in Europe, and has now been displaying an ‘Oops’ page for the past 55 minutes (4:30 PM CET).
Update: it’s back up, downtime lasted exactly one hour.
Update 2: and it’s back down again (4:45 PM CET), they’re having serious technical issues over there.
Update 3: it’s bouncing up and down. Seems to be stable now (4:52 PM CET)
But here’s the irony: I pasted the quote from my Google Reader, since TechCrunch itself is down. Of course there is a whole world of difference between an important service and a blog, as popular as it is – and in fact TechCrunch is still readable via feeds and the Google cache, while Linkedin needs to be available real-time.
Still, the irony of TC devoting a post to another service’s outage, and then going down themselves is hard to miss. So, dear reader, in case CloudAve goes down now, you know what happened….
Update: Well, this was quick: byt the time I hit post, TechCrunch appeared to be back up.