It appears that the social network LinkedIn is down at the moment. According to CNET, this is happening in spurts. In fact, in the middle of writing this article, the site came back up, but now looks to be down again.
LinkedIn actually predates the term social network. Largely dismissed in the era of Facebook and Twitter, the site still has a massive user base. Indeed, when LinkedIn was hacked last summer, the hackers walked away with a wealth of personal data. That’s one good cause for concern. Assuming the outage has nothing to do with hackers, there’s also the big picture reason.
For many, LinkedIn serves as a professional network, a sort of cloud Rolodex. In my own case, the website is used to keep tabs on fellow tech writers and PR reps. The nature of LinkedIn allows me to keep some work/life segregation and to have that data stay up to date without my doing anything. The thing is, that’s dangerous too. By growing dependent on a third-party service to manage one’s data, you run the risk of being out of luck should it go dark. This is something many should have realized when Google Drive went down for a bit on Monday.
As we shift more and more services to the cloud, it’s imperative that people remember to have local back ups, just like we would of our own systems.
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