So, no let-up yet in the frequent time-outs and server-stalls at LinkedIn. Just on the off-chance that nobody had bothered to actually tell the LinkedIn team about these technical issues that are crippling their online service, I figured “Hey, I’ll drop them a line and report the issue.” Of course it wasn’t easy as it should have been to find a link via which send such a report; I first had to trudge through the FAQs page and find the ‘No, this hasn’t answered my question’ link. Which eventually allowed me to start filling in a ‘Submit your question’ form.
“Wonderful,” I thought; “even though each of these pages has taken 5 minutes to load and I’ve had to start over at least once because of a timeout, I’m finally getting somewhere and giving some constructive feedback to this company.” I typed my email address, subject line and message, as prompted, thus:
Click continue… what’s next?
Ah, okay, my name. Makes sense. Here we go…
And that should be it.
Click on Continue and…
Oh dear. What’s this?
Apparently my email address has been entered wrongly in one of the three fields where it was requested. Except that… let’s check… yes, thought so. I was only asked for it once. I have no idea what these Email Alt 1 and Email Alt 2 fields are. What can it mean?
I’ll tell you what it means: this form is Broken.
Now maybe I’m as dumb as dung, and maybe I’m missing something, but it occurs to me that if you are running an online business community as large and wide-ranging as LinkedIn, it might be construed as a problem if the only way that your site provides for your customers to report faults, flaws, or broken functionality is itself faulty, flawed, or broken.
Just a thought.
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9 Comments… so far
Definitely looks like a badly put-together set of error-checks on the form. Maybe left over from an earlier form, tho I’d be surprised if a site with as much traffic as LinkedIn didn’t notice the problem. Did you try again to see if it was a one-off glitch?
@DC_Hero:
Thanks for your input. Yes, I did make numerous attempts at the form, clearing the browser cache and suchlike between tries. No joy; I got the same frustrating error message each time; I wondered, like you, if it was caused by redundant code left over from an earlier version of the form. I also share your surprise that such a glaring problem with form submission has failed to get flagged up by LinkedIn’s development teams, so maybe it is tied to specific browser factors that don’t crop up often. I can’t say I’ve conducted exhaustive tests, and all my LinkedIn browsing has been done on a Mac.
Indeed, I did wonder if all these issues with LinkedIn were browser specific (I generally use Safari) so I switched to Opera as a comparative test. Initially the slow-downs seemed to have vanished, but it turned out to be temporary — the slow performance seems to be pretty browser-agnostic after all.
And at time of writing the slow downs continue. There seems to be an hour or so during the day where everything zips through as you would expect. The rest of the time, forget it.
It’s frustrating, because I’m just starting to properly explore LinkedIn and see it as a potentially valuable business resource. Perhaps a bazillion other people have the same idea and maybe that is the cause of the problem, but if so then I’d have thought that LinkedIn would have sorted out extra server capacity by now. This problem is months old, after all.
I thought my browser had issues!! I tried nearly every browser available (not really
) as I was getting very similar error messages when I need to update my profile. Even when ALL the fields are filled, it shows that something is not filled. If it could point out WHAT that field is, I could probably at least try to fake it!!
Their customer support doesn’t work because I get the same error message as yours.
I can’t reply to messages in my inbox because I can’t access my contacts! When I click the reply button, the To: field is empty. How annoying is that!!? I don’t know how to contact LinkedIn. I’m a new guy there and trying my best to find a solution through the site. I hope they fix their issue soon!
Hi Sunny; no you’re not alone.
Various users’ stories from this thread on Get Satisfaction (which I felt compelled to reply to) seem to suggest that LinkedIn is denying that it’s anything to do with them and that people’s computer hardware configurations are to blame. The fact that the users experiencing the problems experience them only with LinkedIn seems to have passed the LinkedIn support team by.
‘Our site is perfect, it’s everybody’s computers that are broken’ seems to be their stance. I find that very odd.
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Ever try to use LinkedIn internationally? I spent two months in Chile and I’m currently in Thailand. I haven’t been able to use the site to save my life since I left the states. At the moment I’m trying to accept an invitation to connect. I’ve been at it for 15 minutes so far…
Linkedin’s display of the connection list seems to e having problems. Their FAQ admits there’s a problem and offers solutons for IE6 and users of Kaskersky Internet Security. I’ve tried IE8, Firefox (on both Win 7 and Linux) and Chrome, plus I use F-Secure on Win 7, so I’d say the problem is Linkedin’s and not Microsoft’s or Kaspersky’s.
I too wonder that a site which is so popular as Linkedin seems not to be able to fix a problem which is clearly affecting many people!
I did solve this problem a while back, and if memory serves the solution (for me) was the one proposed by DS on the GetSatisfaction web site, here:
http://bit.ly/Lnkdn
Changing my MTU solved the issue for me. Oddly, I just checked my network settings and I have everything set on automatic now — perhaps the result of an OS update. But LinkedIn is working fine for me these day so maybe they have fixed something at their end. I don’t know.
Do try the MTU trick though, if you are still having problems. Of course, YMMV.