Your LinkedIn account has been restricted. What to do, in order

If you are reading this because it has just happened, start here: stop every automated tool touching the account. Not reduced — stopped. Then read the rest.

Most permanent restrictions are not the first thing that happened. They are the third or fourth, arrived at because the activity that caused a warning carried on afterwards. What you do in the first hour has more effect on the outcome than anything you do in the following month.

Work out which stage you are at

The four stages look similar from the inside and mean very different things.

A warning. An in-app notice that unusual activity has been detected. Nothing is blocked yet. This is the cheapest possible signal and the one most people ignore, because the account still works.

A temporary restriction. Invitations, search or messaging stop working for a period, often measured in days. The account is otherwise intact.

A verification request. LinkedIn asks you to confirm your identity before the account is usable. Uncomfortable, but accounts recover from this routinely.

A permanent restriction. The account is closed. Connections, message history, recommendations and any Sales Navigator work built on it go with it.

If you are at the first stage, you have a straightforward problem. If you are at the last, you have a different one, and the rest of this is about not getting there.

Do these, in this order

1. Stop everything automated. Every tool with access, switched off, today. Not throttled. If a tool cannot be paused quickly, disconnect the account from it.

2. Do not create a second account. This is the most common instinct and the most damaging. LinkedIn links duplicate accounts routinely, holding more than one personal profile is itself a violation of the User Agreement, and doing it while under restriction converts a recoverable situation into a permanent one.

3. Complete any verification promptly and honestly. If LinkedIn asks for identity confirmation, do it properly the first time. Partial or evasive responses extend the process.

4. Wait out a temporary restriction without testing its edges. Trying an invitation every few hours to see whether it has lifted is itself activity, and activity during a restriction is read as exactly what it looks like.

5. Do not appeal three times. One clear, factual appeal through LinkedIn’s own form. Repeated submissions do not speed it up and can consolidate into a single dismissive response.

6. When it lifts, resume at a fraction of the old rate. This is where most accounts get restricted a second time. The restriction lifting is not a signal that the previous rate was fine.

Rebuilding a rate afterwards

Treat the account as new, because in terms of standing it effectively is.

A reasonable shape, and roughly what Dizenly’s own warm-up curve does for a fresh account, is to run at about a third of your normal rate for the first three days, half for the first week, three-quarters for the second, and full rate only after two clean weeks.

For an account coming off a restriction rather than merely new, be slower than that. The limits checker has a setting for recent restrictions and drops the working number substantially — that lower number is a ceiling to build towards over weeks, not a target for Monday.

While you rebuild, fix the thing that caused it. Which brings us to the part that is easier to skip.

What actually caused it

It is rarely just volume. In rough order of how often they are the real cause:

Acceptance rate. A large number of invitations that nobody accepts is the clearest signal that an account is contacting people indiscriminately. This is a targeting problem wearing a compliance problem’s clothes.

Reports. Recipients marking messages as spam carries more weight than volume. Ten reports will do more damage than a thousand ignored invitations.

Rhythm. Actions seconds apart, or evenly spaced in a way no human types, are recognisable regardless of how modest the daily total is.

A sudden jump. Going from quiet to busy in a day is a stronger signal than being consistently busy.

Location. A session appearing from a country the account has never logged in from — which is what cloud-based automation looks like unless it is carefully routed.

If the honest answer is the first one, more careful pacing will not fix it. You will get restricted again at a lower volume, because the problem was never the volume.

Preventing the second one

The uncomfortable conclusion is that most restrictions are a symptom. An account contacting the right people at a modest rate very rarely gets restricted, and it does not have to think about limits much at all.

That is the argument for spending the effort upstream — on deciding who is worth contacting rather than on how to contact more people per hour. Twenty-five well-chosen prospects a day, with a message written for them, will out-convert a hundred rushed ones and will not put the account anywhere near a threshold.

Two things worth saying plainly

No tool can promise this will not happen to you, including ours. LinkedIn changes enforcement without notice and applies it unevenly. Anyone offering a guarantee is guessing with your account.

None of this is legal advice. Read LinkedIn’s current User Agreement yourself rather than taking any vendor’s summary of it, including this one.

If you want the full enforcement picture rather than just the recovery steps, what actually triggers a restriction covers the stages, the triggers and the limits in one place.