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a, Australia and Ireland. In October 2010 LinkedIn was ranked No. 10 on the Silicon Valley Insider's Top 100 List of most valuable startups. From 2015, most of the company's revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals; LinkedIn also introduced its own ad portal named LinkedIn Ads to let companies advertise in its platform. In December 2016, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, being its largest acquisition at the time. 94% of business-to-business marketers since 2017 use LinkedIn to distribute their content.
LinkedIn has been subject to criticism over its design choices, such as its endorsement feature and its use of members' e-mail accounts to send spam mail. Due to LinkedIn's poor security practices, several incidents have occurred with the website, including in 2012, when the cryptographic hashes of approximately 6.4 million users were stolen and published online; and in 2016, when 117 million LinkedIn usernames and passwords (likely sourced from the 2012 hack) were offered for sale. The platform has also been criticized for its poor handling of misinformation and disinformation, particularly pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic and to the 2020 US presidential election.
LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011. The company traded its first shares on May 19, 2011, under the NYSE symbol "LNKD", at $45 (≈$62.00 in 2024) per share. Shares of LinkedIn rose as much as 171% on their first day of trade on the New York Stock Exchange and closed at $94.25, more than 109% above IPO price. Shortly after the IPO, the site's underlying infrastructure was revised to allow accelerated revision-release cycles. In 2011, LinkedIn earned $154.6 million in advertising revenue alone, surpassing Twitter, which earned $139.5 million. LinkedIn's fourth-quarter 2011, earnings soared because of the company's increase in success in the social media world. By this point, LinkedIn had about 2,100 full-time employees compared to the 500 that it had in 2010.
In April 2014, LinkedIn announced that it had leased 222 Second Street, a 26-story building under construction in San Francisco's SoMa district, to accommodate up to 2,500 of its employees, with the lease covering 10 years. The goal was to join all San Francisco-based staff (1,250 as of January 2016) in one building, bringing sales and marketing employees together with the research and development team. In March 2016 they started to move in. In February 2016 following an earnings report, LinkedIn's shares dropped 43.6% within a single day, down to $108.38 per share. LinkedIn lost $10 billion of its market capitalization that day.
In 2016, access to LinkedIn was blocked by Russian authorities for non-compliance with the 2015 national legislation that requires social media networks to store citizens' personal data on servers located in Russia.
In June 2016, Microsoft announced that it would acquire LinkedIn for $196 a share, a total value of $26.2 billion. It was the largest acquisition made by Microsoft, until the acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2022. The acquisition would be an all-cash, debt-financed transaction. Microsoft would allow LinkedIn to "retain its distinct brand, culture and independence", with Weiner to remain as CEO, who would then report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Analysts believed Microsoft saw the opportunity to integrate LinkedIn with its Office product suite to help better integrate the professional network system with its products. The deal was completed on December 8, 2016.
In late 2016, LinkedIn announced a planned increase of 200 new positions in its Dublin office, which would bring the total employee count to 1,200. Since 2017 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.
Soon after LinkedIn's acquisition by Microsoft, LinkedIn's new desktop version was introduced. The new version was meant to make the user experience similar across mobile and desktop. Some changes were made according to the feedback received from the previously launched mobile app. Features that were not heavily used were removed. For example, the contact tagging and filtering features are not supported anymore.
Following the launch of the new user interface (UI), some users complained about the missing features which were there in the older version, slowness, and bugs in it. The issues were faced by free and premium users and with both the desktop and mobile versions of the site.
In 2019, LinkedIn launched globally the feature Open for Business that enables freelancers to be discovered on the platform. LinkedIn Events was launched in the same year.
In June 2020, Jeff Weiner stepped down as CEO and became executive chairman after 11 years in the role. Ryan Roslansky stepped up as CEO from his previous position as the senior vice president of product. In late July 2020, LinkedIn announced it laid off 960 employees, about 6 percent of the total workforce, from the talent acquisition and global sales teams. In an email to all employees, CEO Ryan Roslansky said the cuts were due to effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2021, CyberNews claimed that 500 million LinkedIn's accounts have leaked online. However, LinkedIn stated that "We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies".
In June 2021, PrivacySharks claimed that more than 700 million LinkedIn records were on sale on a hacker forum. LinkedIn later stated that this is not a breach, but scraped data which is also a violation of its Terms of Service.
In Sep 2021, LinkedIn blocks U.S. journalists' profiles in China. Includes but is not limited to Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, Melissa Chan, Greg Bruno, Jojje Olsson, J Michael Cole.
Microsoft ended LinkedIn operations in China in October 2021.
In 2022, LinkedIn earned $13.8 billion in revenue, compared to $10.3 billion in 2021.
In May 2023, LinkedIn cut 716 positions from its 20,000 workforce. The move, according to a letter from the company's CEO Ryan Roslansky, was made to streamline the business's operations. Roslansky further stated that this decision would result in the creation of 250 job opportunities. Additionally, LinkedIn also announced the discontinuance of its China local job apps.
In June 2024, Axios reported LinkedIn was testing a new AI assistant for its paid Premium users.
In September 2024, LinkedIn suspended its use of UK user data for AI model training after concerns were raised by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The platform had quietly opted in users globally for data use in AI training. However, following ICO feedback, LinkedIn paused this practice for UK users. A company spokesperson stated that LinkedIn has always allowed users to control how their data is used and has now provided UK users with an opt-out option.
In November 2024, Linkedin challenged Australian legislation which sought to ban under-16's from social media platforms on the grounds that it does 'not have content interesting and appealing to minors.'
In October 2025, the LinkedIn Learning Career Hub was launched.
In May 2026, LinkedIn introduced an agency certification initiative intended to help advertisers identify firms with experience using the platform's advertising and campaign tools. That same month, Amazon Ads and LinkedIn announced a collaboration allowing advertisers to use LinkedIn audience data for targeted connected TV advertising through Amazon DSP.
In June 2026, LinkedIn launched a creator marketplace that allows businesses to identify, evaluate, and connect with content creators specializing in professional and business-related topics.
In May 2017, LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist letter to hiQ Labs, a Silicon Valley startup that collects data from public profiles and provides analysis of this data to its customers. The letter demanded that hiQ immediately cease "scraping" data from LinkedIn's servers, claiming violations of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) and the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). In response hiQ sued LinkedIn in the Northern District of California in San Francisco, asking the court to prohibit LinkedIn from blocking its access to public profiles while the court considered the merits of its request. The court served a preliminary injunction against LinkedIn, which was then forced to allow hiQ to continue to collect public data. LinkedIn appealed this ruling; in September 2019, the appeals court rejected LinkedIn's arguments and the preliminary injunction was upheld. The dispute is ongoing.
In May 2026, LinkedIn announced a reduction of its global workforce by approximately 5%, affecting roughly 875 employees across its engineering, product, and marketing divisions.