BoingBoing buddy Jason Calacanis points us to Linkedin.com, which — instead of the Linkedin network site — now defaults to a domain registrar temporary page. What's up? Someone forget to pay the domain name renewal bill? They just received $4.7 million in financing, so unless someone's buying their engineers a whoooole lot of Skittles and Red Bull, that can't be it. Whois shows that the domain still belongs to Linkedin, Inc. Could this be related to recent reports of patent conflict, backbiting, and incestuous dealmaking involving Linkedin, Tribe.net, Friendster, and a horde of hungry investors, hmmmm? Or what I suspect to be the real deal here — our alien overlords have returned to earth in a shiny new spacecraft, and they want to eat all the online networkers first? Link. Thanks also to IHeartMena blog, who evidently noticed the news before any of us.
Update: Konstantin, co-founder of Linkedin, replies:
Just read the story on BoingBoing about people wondering where their LinkedIn is . . . no, no aliens; also, while tempting, we did not take off to Bermuda right after the financing :) . . . unfortunately, our domain name registrar messed up the renewal billing (it was set to auto-renew).
We notified them of the problem last night. They promised to fix it this morning, but now it's going to take until tomorrow morning. And then it takes 24 hrs to propagate across every server on the Internet. No fun — especially the day of a big article in the Washington Post and a day after the one in the Wall Street Journal.
