LinkedIn is recovering from a DNS issue that sent visitors to a different web site for an hour Wednesday night.

The issue, which is now resolved for most users, rerouted the traffic to a domain sales page.

LinkedIn, a popular professional social network, acknowledged the issue in a tweet, but did not elaborate.

Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, we're continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience. — LinkedIn (@LinkedIn) June 20, 2013

However, App.net co-founder Bryan Berg claims there's more to the issue.

"LinkedIn just got DNS hijacked, and for the last hour or so, all of your traffic has been sent to a network hosted by this company [confluence-networks.com]. And they don't require SSL, so if you tried to visit, your browser sent your long-lived session cookies in plaintext," Berg wrote.

If he is correct, it's possible that user cookies were captured in plaintext by a third party that could use them to compromise LinkedIn accounts.

LinkedIn has had its share of security problems in June 2012, when 6.5 million encrypted passwords were leaked online.

LinkedIn did not immediately respond to a request for comment. We will update the story as we get more details.

Update: LinkedIn has sent us the following statement: "LinkedIn is experiencing some intermittent issues due to a DNS issue. Many users have since been able to access the site. Our team continues to work on it and we hope to resolve this as soon as possible."

Update 2: Several hours later, LinkedIn has sent us some more info about the issue: "“For a short time on Wednesday evening, linkedin.com was not accessible to a majority of our members. We have been told by the company that manages our domain that this was due to an error made on their end, not due to malicious activity of any kind. Our team was able to quickly address the issue, and our site has returned to normal. We believe that at no point was any LinkedIn member data compromised in any way."

Image courtesy of LinkedIn