More than half of professional networking site Linkedin's members were knocked off the service for an extended period yesterday following a problematic response to a DDOS incident by service provider Network Solutions according to digital media site Which-50.
The customer impact was that most users trying to visit the site during the incident where redirected to the wrong site.
Initial media reports suggested the company's DNS had been hijacked and user security potentially compromised as user's cookies may have been visible as plain text during the outage.
Linkedin subsequently confirmed that the outage was due to human error not malice.
" For a short time on Wednesday evening, linkedin.com was not accessible to a majority of our members. We have been told by the company that manages our domain that this was due to an error made on their end, not due to malicious activity of any kind. Our team was able to quickly address the issue, and our site has returned to normal. We believe that at no point was any LinkedIn member data compromised in any way."
LinkedIn's partner Network Solutions, which was responsible for the outage was more explicit in its clarification, " None of which involved malicious activity. No confidential data was compromised, including passwords, credit card information, or cookies."
LinkedIn was probably not the only company affected. Fidelity.com also fell foul of the same redirect error, according to reports.
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