During this incident, some customers were unable to connect new LinkedIn channels to Buffer or refresh existing LinkedIn connections. Attempts to connect LinkedIn accounts failed with a generic error message, while connections to other social networks continued to work normally. This was caused by an upstream LinkedIn API disruption that resulted in intermittent server errors during the LinkedIn connection process.

Once LinkedIn’s service recovered, we were able to verify that LinkedIn connections were working again (both re-authenticating an existing connection and adding a new one). As follow-ups, we're working on improving our detection and customer-facing messaging so that third-party outages like this are identified earlier and can be explained more explicitly when they affect the connection flow.