We were delighted to read today that LinkedIn has now permanently enabled IPv6 for their website. I proved it myself by visiting the LinkedIn site moments ago using a Google Chrome browser with the IPvFoo extension installed:

As my colleague Phil Roberts writes on the Internet Technology Matters blog:

As they say, “The transition to IPv6 is invisible for our members.” So if you’re a member who has looked at your LinkedIn profile today, you did this over IPv6 and probably weren’t aware. I’m also encouraged that in their trial run before the full launch, they saw about 3% of their members using IPv6 to reach them.

Given that I have native IPv6 in my home office, presumably my connections to LinkedIn from my various devices will now start to all be over IPv6… which is excellent for the growth of the Internet!

Personally, given how much I do with social media, I’m pleased because this now means that with one exception the major social networks I use will all work over IPv6:

Facebook

Google … both for Google+ and for YouTube

LinkedIn

… which just leaves Twitter as the major social media laggard still stuck on legacy IPv4 (of the social networks I use).

When you consider that other major sites like Yahoo, Wikipedia, AOL, Netflix and thousands of other web sites are now available over IPv6, adding LinkedIn to those sites is a great addition.

Particularly when LinkedIn has a major focus right now of aiming to recruit people to publish content on their platform – this move means that all that new content will now be accessible to all the new networks that are coming online via IPv6.

Congratulations to Zaid Ali Kahn and the rest of the LinkedIn team that made this happen! As he notes in his post:

Rolling out IPv6 at scale was not a trivial task. Our IPv6 task force has worked for a year to ensure today’s smooth addition of IPv6 connectivity. We did many code changes and a series of production tests along the way, including a recent 42-hour global test where we saw approximately 3 percent of members visiting LinkedIn services via IPv6. The IPv6 task force was a collective effort of many talented individuals across engineering and operational teams.

Congrats! And we look forward to many other content providers and web sites joining the production version of the Internet running over IPv6!

If you want to get started with making the move to IPv6, please see our Start Here page to find resources most appropriate to your type of organization. If you operate a web site like LinkedIn, you may find our “IPv6 for content providers” page the easiest place to start. And please do let us know if you need more help!