Is LinkedIn the Latest Victim of the Social Network Attacks?

Is LinkedIn the latest social network victim to be attacked with a DDoS attack?
LinkedIn was unavailable 5+ hours Saturday, only two days after a rash of social network attacks disrupted services globally. I can’t remember LinkedIn being down for anywhere near 5 hours before. Twitter, Facebook and Google all reported Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS) last week. Have the hackers moved on to LinkedIn as their next target? Is this political, the continuation of anti-social media trend started by Twitter and Facebook’s shutdown in China?

Is Humor the Silver Lining?

Its funny to see that Twitter is low hanging fruit for hackers. Twitter seeks to be the “pulse of the planet”, but the “Fail Whale” dominated on Thursday when hackers turned their sights on the popular micro-blogging service.
Facebook suffered outages, but weathered the storm well. Google was attacked – but suffered no problems – much like a giant being bothered by a gnat. We can only assume the highly scalable Google has been a primary hacker target for a decade, and is well fortified to withstand attacks.

“Oh, that’s right! LinkedIn”…. We can imagine the Abkahzia hackers belatedly turning their attention to LinkedIn – that “other major social network” – one they apparently don’t use regularly. Maybe they found it on TechCruch. While its far fetched that LinkedIn was drawn into the Russian / Georgian conflict to silence propaganda (one theory for the Twitter and Facebook attacks for this week), its possible that LinkedIn’s recent“updates feed” could provide a communications channel in the political cat and mouse being played via social media.

What was LinkedIn Thinking?

At the very least, it’s a PR gaffe for LinkedIn to throw the “off switch” most of Saturday, on the heels of attacks against its social network peers. Perhaps LinkedIn was doing a security update to protect against the social network attacks? Or maybe Linkedin’s network of over 43 million professionals don’t use LinkedIn on weekends … and its OK to turn the site off Saturdays when professional are with the kids?

LinkedIn Outage Message

Here is the outage screen that greeted me at 4:30 PM PST Saturday August 8th:

When I realized that its outage message was talking about 10:00 PM PST, not 10:00 PM EST, my disappointment quickly turned to apprehension (I am on the West Coast, so I was staring at 5+ hours of downtime…). Was LinkedIn is the latest social network victim?

Please let us know if you are experiencing any problems with LinkedIn.