LinkedIn Moves To Los Angeles Data Center

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LinkedIn on Monday continued to tune and optimize Web site performance following a transition to its new Los Angeles data center over the weekend. The business service temporarily took its site offline during the scheduled cutover Sunday.

The company opted to shut down at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, typically a less busy day and time, said Stefan Apitz, LinkedIn's senior director of operations, on a company blog. This enabled LinkedIn to synchronize and test the new data center, he said.

"We’ve chosen the lowest traffic day on a weekend, so this will impact the least number of users. We do understand how essential LinkedIn is to many of our users, and for those of you working over the weekend, we apologize in advance for the inconvenience this causes," he said.

Apparently, work continued into Monday morning, Eastern. Some users could not consistently log onto the site, and saw the following message:

"We’ve notified our operations staff that you are having a problem reaching LinkedIn. We’ll get you reconnected soon. You can leave this window open and we’ll automatically take you back to your LinkedIn home page in a few minutes. We apologize for the interruption."

LinkedIn also amended Apitz's blog.

"We continue to tune our site and optimize site performance following our recent cutover to the new Los Angeles data center. Thanks for your patience during the transition," the update said.

LinkedIn had been planning the move to the new data center for months, according to the company. In late 2008, the company set up a new data center in Chicago and, since then, has seen its accountholder base increase almost three-fold, Apitz said.

"It is time to add an additional, more robust data center that not only helps us handle the increasing traffic load on our servers, but to also provide more redundancy in case of an emergency," he said. "Our team has been working hard for months on the design, subsequent build out, and the deployment of the many database and application servers that make up our production site today."