Many of my prospects say 'Profile inaccessible' — are they lost?
No — Apr 30 fix. Previously, whenever LinkedIn declined a profile lookup (the case shown to you as 'Profile inaccessible'), we marked the prospect as permanently failed with no further retry — even though that one response covers several genuinely different situations, some of which recover on a second attempt:
- Sales Navigator links that don't resolve on one attempt but resolve cleanly on the next.
- Link-format issues that our fallback lookup handles.
- Transient upstream issues that clear within minutes.
A platform-wide audit found 21,868 prospects discarded this way.
The fix defers instead of discarding:
- The prospect moves to 'pending resolution' rather than permanently failed.
- We retry with widening gaps, up to five attempts, before marking anything as permanently failed.
- The 21,868 affected prospects were swept into that same recovery flow, with their retries spread over 24 hours so the queue never pushes against LinkedIn's rate limits.
What you should do:
- If you see this status on individual prospects, check that their LinkedIn URL is current. Regular linkedin.com/in/<handle> URLs resolve most reliably.
- Click Retry on the prospect detail page if you want an immediate re-attempt; otherwise recovery is automatic.
- If a prospect keeps landing back in 'pending resolution' after five retries, that's a genuinely restricted profile. It will be marked as failed at that point, and you can safely exclude or remove them.
No manual recovery is needed for the 21,868 affected prospects — that was handled for you.