Microsoft's plans to move LinkedIn to Azure have been put on hold, according to people familiar with the matter (via CNBC).
The project, codenamed 'Blueshift', was announced in 2019, three years after Microsoft acquired the social media and networking platform. Until now, LinkedIn has been using its own data centers, and now that the project has apparently been canceled, it looks like that will remain the case.
Some Microsoft employees report hearing about the project's pause last year, but a new document was seen CNBC describes a mutual agreement between Microsoft and LinkedIn to delay the migration.
LinkedIn will not use Azure
The precise reasons behind both companies' decisions are unclear. LinkedIn CTO Raghu Hiremagalur said in a memo to employees last year: “With the incredible demand Azure is seeing and the growth of our platform, we have decided to pause our planned migration from LinkedIn to reallocate resources to external Azure customers.”
Revenue from Microsoft Cloud, which includes Azure and other companies, rose 22.1% in the company's 2023 fiscal year, which ended June 30. During that period, interest in Microsoft-powered OpenAI generative AI products soared, which in turn increased sales. LinkedIn also experienced healthy growth of 9.6%.
Redmond has also had a lot of trouble around the world from various antitrust regulators. Key to many of these cases has been unfair dominance and anti-competitive business practices, often involving cloud services. However, Microsoft remains in second place, far behind AWS.
A LinkedIn spokesperson said: “We are using Azure to supplement our infrastructure needs and continue to invest in our data centers.”
One of the people familiar with the matter added that LinkedIn is building a new data center to meet its computing needs, suggesting the platform has no immediate plans to see through its Project Blueshift.