This morning  a strange sight greeted me when I tried to get on to Linked-in –  a HTTP 500 error!! Never have I encountered such a thing with any major online service that is delivered from a worldwide CDN (Content Delivery Network).

A couple of servers down here and there and minor disruptions in service (slow load-time due to rerouting) is understandable, but a 500 error? As far as I know, this occurs only if there’s something severely wrong with the application’s code causing Apache to hiccup and die while trying to deliver it.

And for Linked-in to be knocked out on this scale, the same code-base must have propagated to all their servers across the world.

If you ask me it’s outright callousness on part of their dev team to let something like this happen. Even if I were to consider that someone’s been playing naughty with ’em, I can’t imagine on what scale the hacking would have happened to make their whole network behave the same way!!

P.S. By the time I got over with writing this post (11:20am UTC+7), they’re still in the same state. Someone probably needs to stick a finger in their eyes and point it out… they can at least afford to put up a graceful “Maintenance mode” page, till they rectify this.