Is LinkedIn on dialup?

For days now, perhaps even weeks, I’ve been finding LinkedIn to be painfully slow, and it seems to be getting worse, not better. Almost anything I try to do on the site — even signing in — results in horribly protracted wheel-spinning and often a timeout. At first I thought it might be my own connection; I have been, more often than not, trying to access the site via my iPhone, and despite having a strong wifi signal I was prepared to believe that something at my end was causing the slowdown. But I get the same molasses-like performance from the LinkedIn site via my laptop on every network I try.

I’m guessing that LinkedIn is a large enough operation not to be run by one spotty teenager from his bedroom in Fat Pie, Nebraska (in fact, I know full well that it isn’t) so I’m at a loss as to why this should be. Has nobody mentioned this sluggish behaviour to the LinkedIn team?

Hopefully this will resolve itself soon, because I love the idea of LinkedIn; it’s a visually well-designed site and the premise — gather a network of business connections around yourself for the betterment of all — is a strong one. And although it’s always promised to be more useful to me than it actually is, that certainly says more about me than the service.

Perhaps the current economic climate is to blame. With a recession killing business faster than the Grim Reaper and swine flu combined, a LinkedIn profile is being viewed as a must-have resource for many business people, especially at the smaller end of the corporate scale. It is entirely possible that LinkedIn is a victim of its own success, drowning under the weight of struggling businesses everywhere.

Maybe, if they can just beef up their servers to cope with the deluge, they’ll emerge as the biggest success story of the recession.