LinkedIn 2013 Annual Report Download - page 21

• successfully adapt to mobile markets and optimize services for mobile devices;
• successfully expand our business in markets outside the United States;
• successfully compete with other companies that are currently in, or may in the future enter, the
online professional networking space; and
• defend ourselves against litigation, regulatory, intellectual property, privacy and other claims.
If the market for online professional networks does not develop as we expect, or if we fail to address
the needs of this market, our business will be harmed. We may not be able to successfully address these
risks and difficulties or others, including those described elsewhere in these risk factors. Failure to
adequately address these risks and difficulties could harm our business and cause our operating results to
suffer.
We may not timely and effectively scale and adapt our existing technology and network infrastructure to ensure
that our services and solutions are accessible within an acceptable load time. Additionally, natural disasters or
other catastrophic occurrences beyond our control could interfere with access to our services.
A key element to our continued growth is the ability of our members, users (whom we define as
anyone who visits one of our websites through a computer or application on a mobile device, regardless of
whether or not they are a member), enterprises and professional organizations in all geographies to access
our websites, services and solutions within acceptable load times. We call this website performance. We
have experienced, and may in the future experience, service disruptions, outages and other performance
problems due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, human or software errors, capacity
constraints due to an overwhelming number of users accessing our services simultaneously, and denial of
service or fraud or security attacks. In some instances, we may not be able to identify the cause or causes
of these website performance problems within an acceptable period of time. We expect it will become
increasingly difficult to maintain and improve our website performance, especially during peak usage times
and as our solutions become more complex and our total user traffic increases. If our services are
unavailable when users attempt to access them or they do not load as quickly as users expect, users may
seek other websites or services to obtain the information for which they are looking, and may not return
to our website or use our services as often in the future, or at all. This would negatively impact our ability
to attract members, enterprises and professional organizations and increase engagement of our members
and users. We expect to continue to make significant investments to maintain and improve website
performance and to enable rapid releases of new features and products. To the extent that we do not
effectively address capacity constraints, upgrade our systems as needed and continually develop our
technology and network architecture to accommodate actual and anticipated changes in technology, our
business and operating results may be harmed.
We have implemented a disaster recovery program, which allows us to move production to a back-up
data center in the event of a catastrophe. Although this program is functional, it does not yet provide a
real-time back-up data center, so if our primary data center shuts down, there will be a period of time
that our services will remain shut down while the transition to the back-up data center takes place.
Our systems are also vulnerable to damage or interruption from catastrophic occurrences such as
earthquakes, floods, fires, power loss, telecommunication failures, terrorist attacks and similar events. Our
U.S. corporate offices and certain of the facilities we lease to house our computer and
telecommunications equipment are located in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California, both
regions known for seismic activity. Despite any precautions we may take, the occurrence of a natural
disaster or other unanticipated problems at our hosting facilities could result in lengthy interruptions in
our services.
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