LinkedIn DDoS response botched

More than half of Linkedin's members were knocked off the service for an extended period yesterday following a botched response to a DDOS by service provider Network Solutions. 

Users were redirected in error to India-based website confluence-networks.com which did not require Secure Sockets Layer connections meaning users' cookies were sent in clear text.

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 on Twitter that the outage was due to human error not malice.

"Yesterday's issue was not malicious in any way It was an error by the company that manages our domain," the statement said.

In a post on its site the company claimed LinkedIn member data was not compromised.

Fidelity.com also fell foul of the same redirect error, according to reports.