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No Connection Download

Page history last edited by Marc Freedman 8 years, 4 months ago

From LinkedInSurprises

 

If you have a lot of connections, generally more than 10,000, certainly the max 30,000, you can't export or download your connections.  Customer service generally ignores such complaints and will not manually provide the file.

 

This has been an ongoing  and known problem.  It's the result of one or more of the following:

  • An intentional restriction.  I think this unlikely as there is not a direct or immediate limitation. It appears to be more a technical problem.
  • A failure in how the LinkedIn back-end is architected.  This is suggested by it normally working but resulting in a timeout error for large enough connection lists (greater than 2+ MB).
  • Benign neglect.   LinkedIn has never made it a priority to fix or resolve this. While re-engineering their architecture may be prohibitive for a live export, there are reasonable solutions.  It's typical in situations like this for services to periodically run a batch process to create a static file that can easily be downloaded.  For 30K connections, the download files is only 8MB in size.

 

 

 

General timeline

  • 2007.  Connection download previously was not a problem.  After this time it typically but not always failed.  The Export page displayed a message that Connection had downloaded.  However the file never downloaded.  The page would hang in that state.
  • 2010. Dec 2010 was the last time I was able to export my connections.
  • 2012. LinkedIn added an error timeout screen.  Putting a tiny bandage over this failure only insults users like me who still can't download our own contacts.
  • June 2015.  LinkedIn removed export for all users.  After complaints from many users, they restored export.  
  • Oct 2015. I was able to download for the first time in 5 years.  This appears to be a one-in-a-million fluke as both others and I are not able to repeat this miracle. 

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