LinkedIn outages

One of the issues with moving towards a online services is that we can become a hostage to the system's availability. In other words, YOUR service is dependent on SOMEONE ELSE'S software. LinkedIn is the latest online service to suffer service outages. You'll find them documented on Pingdom here: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/10/10/is-linkedin-having-scaling-issues/

I guess with the issues in the current financial markets we shouldn't be surprised that LinkedIn is getting just a little more traffic.

On a related note, at a CIO event this evening one of the speakers (Chris Neale from Harvey Nash) made a comment that people really ought to pay more attention to their profiles on online sites such as LinkedIn. In his view (and I tend to agree), people's online profiles are vastly inferior to the paper based one - often reverting to being more that a list of projects that we have worked. LinkedIn doesn't do us any favours here since the platform tends to guide us down this path, but the extra effort required will be worth it.