LinkedIn is a large professional social network with 50 million users from around the world. It faces big data challenges at scale, such as caching a user's third degree network of up to 20 million connections and performing searches across 50 million user profiles. LinkedIn uses Hadoop and other scalable architectures like distributed search engines and custom graph engines to solve these problems. Hadoop provides a scalable framework to process massive amounts of user data across thousands of nodes through its MapReduce programming model and HDFS distributed file system.