LinkedIn Shuts Down Apollo: A Turning Point for Data Scraping and Cold Outreach

Happy Sunday folks! We’re exploring a major shift in email marketing and data privacy: LinkedIn has disabled Apollo, a widely used cold outreach tool. This decision could reshape the landscape of data scraping and unsolicited emails. Let’s break it down and see what it means for the industry and your inbox. 📮 

The Bigger Picture: Beyond Spam Filters

For years, spam filters, industry standards like M3AAWG (Messaging, Malware, Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group), and best practices have aimed to stop spam and cold outreach. These measures help, but they’re often just temporary fixes addressing symptoms rather than the root cause.

The deeper issue lies with platforms like LinkedIn - it’s a goldmine of user data with millions of B2C customers and professionals. Tools like Apollo have long overused and abused this resource, scraping contact details to power waves of cold emails. No matter how strong your spam filters or security protocols are, they struggle against the creativity of senders armed with your email address. Apollo made it much easier to scrap data and flood inboxes using tactics like spintax, IP rotation, SMTP tricks, Cyrillic subject lines, and warmed-up email structures with hundreds of look-a-like domains and sub-domains.

Apollo: A Giant Falls?

Apollo.io, founded in 2015, is a sales intelligence platform trusted by over 160,000 companies, including Autodesk and Rippling, with more than 1 million users globally. It leveraged a massive database—boasting over 270 million contacts and 30 million companies indexed—often integrating with LinkedIn to uncover email addresses and phone numbers. No minor player, Apollo empowered users with detailed personal data, automated outreach tools, and CRM integrations. Its growth was explosive, securing over $250 million in venture funding and reaching a $1.6 billion valuation by 2023. From startups to enterprise giants, companies relied on it to fuel their sales pipelines.

But that success had a price. Apollo’s aggressive data collection and messaging automation clashed with LinkedIn’s tightening policies. On March 7, 2025, LinkedIn pulled the plug, disabling Apollo’s access. Apollo’s response was understated: “All we know is that two company profiles for two popular tools are currently unavailable. That’s it. That’s the whole story.” This shutdown poses a serious challenge for Apollo’s leadership and others banking on similar strategies.

What’s Next? More Restrictions—and Resilience

Will LinkedIn tighten the screws further? Almost certainly. But history shows tools like Apollo don’t just disappear—they resurrect, adaptade and come back. These companies often pivot, tapping into alternative data sources beyond LinkedIn to keep operating.

I see this less as Apollo’s downfall and more as LinkedIn drawing a line against firms that scrape and sell data using its platform. Even if Apollo or its successors bounce back, the focus on data ethics is intensifying. Scraping may endure, but platforms and regulators are paying closer attention than ever.

For email marketers, this is a wake-up call. Leaning on scraped data isn’t just risky—it’s a dead-end approach. The future lies in building trust with ethical, permission-based tactics. LinkedIn’s crackdown on Apollo might be the nudge we need to rethink how we engage prospects.

Your Thoughts?

What’s your take? Will stricter platform rules solve this, or will cold outreach just find new loopholes? Drop me a line—I’d love to hear your perspective!

Until next week,

Pavel