Although it has recently implemented a disaster recovery program, the professional social networking company LinkedIn does not currently have a way to quickly shift production workload to a back-up data center.

In documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company disclosed that downtime at its primary data center means downtime for LinkedIn.

"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 the website will remain shut down while the transition to the back-up data center takes place," the document read.

The document cited is LinkedIn's statement of registration for an Initial Public Offering, which aims to raise up to US$175m. The offering's underwriters are Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merill Lynch, JP Morgan, Allen and Company and UBS.

Downtime risk for LinkedIn is heightened because data center space the company leases to house a lot of its infrastructure is in facilities located in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Los Angeles. Both regions are known to experience frequent earthquakes.

LinkedIn's lack of a functional failover system became apparent in December. The company's website experienced about six hours of planned downtime that month, as its technicians were upgrading systems in the newer data center in Los Angeles.