Short answers, pulled from the story.
LinkedIn was founded in December 2002 by Reid Hoffman and a team that included Allen Blue, Eric Ly, Jean-Luc Vaillant, and others drawn largely from PayPal and Socialnet.com. The platform launched publicly on the 5th of May 2003.
Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, at $196 per share, announced in June 2016. The deal closed on the 8th of December 2016 and was the largest acquisition Microsoft had ever made at the time.
As of March 2026, LinkedIn has 1.3 billion registered users from over 200 countries and territories. In February 2026, the platform recorded 1.4 billion monthly visits.
In June 2012, hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin and others stole cryptographic hashes of approximately 6.4 million LinkedIn user passwords and published them online. The breach was later found to be larger than first estimated: in May 2016, 117 million LinkedIn usernames and passwords were offered for sale online for the equivalent of $2,200, believed to originate from the same 2012 hack.
A Moscow court ruled in 2016 that LinkedIn violated a Russian data retention law requiring personal data of Russian citizens to be stored on servers within Russia. The ban was upheld on the 10th of November 2016, and all Russian internet service providers began blocking the platform. LinkedIn's mobile app was also removed from app stores in Russia in January 2017.
The economic graph was a goal set by then-CEO Jeff Weiner in 2012 to build a comprehensive digital map of the world economy within a decade. The project was designed to include all job listings worldwide, all skills required for those jobs, all professionals who could fill them, and all companies at which they work. In June 2014, LinkedIn announced a search architecture called Galene to give users access to the economic graph's data.